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  • Best Scottish Poems 2011
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Best Scottish Poems 2011

Happy is the Man - by Dawn Wood

{ Poem }

Happy is the man who knows that little is more than enough.
/ He is deaf to the hindrance of plenty.
/ He herds,…

Imago - by JL Williams

{ Poem }

He thought of so many ways to make this
/ (veined wing, weightless thing),
/ walked in nothingness dreaming.
/
/ Gathered and tossed stars like coins…

Staying In - by Charlotte Runcie

{ Poem }

I watch the city shrug its clothes back on.
/ An appaloosa spatter gathers scent
/ that hits the brain the way it hits…

Pomegranate - by Alasdair Paterson

{ Poem }

The soldier boys know nothing / of the world but how to end it.

Bladerunner - by Rob A. Mackenzie

{ Poem }

Let’s do something you’ll never tell
/ your friends about, my convenient wife.
/ Read me theology until holiness runs
/ deeper than my sackcloth and…

Coalend Hill Farm 1962 - by Pippa Little

{ Poem }

I don’t remember the Beanley orra-man,
/ his boots down the lonnen black as a wet day, his caravan
/ under a butchered elm’s…

September - by Dorothy Lawrenson

{ Poem }

Summer is leaving too, exchanging its gold
for brass and copper. It is not so strange
to feel nostalgia for the present; already
this September evening is as old
as a photograph of itself.

The Place de L’Institut - by David Kinloch

{ Poem }

i.m. Anne Redpath
/
/ When I pause (I always do) the place
/ is placid – no reason to pause – its blandness
/ a principle…

Castletown, Isle of Man - by Jackie Kay

{ Poem }

How strange the way old lovers move into the present,
/ tense, and catch you off guard; you tell me
/ when you were…

Tree Surgeons - by Brian Johnstone

{ Poem }

They range amongst the upper limbs
/ like primates encumbered with care,
/
/ find parts of trees we’d recognise
/ as human gestures on the level,
/
/ pass…

Springs - by Kathleen Jamie

{ Poem }

Full March moon and gale-force easters, the pair of them
/ sucking and shoving the river
/ back into its closet in the hills…

The Académie Française Considers a Word for ‘Dogging’ - by Andy Jackson

{ Poem }

Chiennage, a literal response, is cast aside,
/ its laziness the thin end of the wedge, reminder
/ that the Anglophones are twenty miles…

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