The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry

Edited by Matt McGuire and Colin Nicholson

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Paper, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-3626-6
$28.50

August, 2009
Cloth, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-3625-9
Edinburgh University Press
$95.00

Combining thematic chapters with in-depth analyses of key English, Gaelic, and Scots poems, the volume addresses the central issues that respond to social, economic, and political changes, such as the influence of tradition (both national and international); the question of language; the rise of women's writing; the relationship between poetry and politics; and the importance of place to the Scottish imagination. Chapters reflect a broad range of interests while also offering detailed analyses of the ways writers broach their subject matter, including close readings of Edwin Morgan, Kenneth White, Aonghas MacNeacail, Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside, Robin Robertson, Mick Imlah, and Don Paterson, among others. Practicing poets and academics capture the range and quality of poetry in Scotland.

Related Subjects

• European and British Literature
• Poetry
• Scottish Studies

Series

• Edinburgh Companions to Scottish Literature

About the Author

Matt McGuire is a lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on Scottish and Irish literature and is the author of The Essential Guide to Contemporary Scottish Literature. His work has appeared in the Edinburgh Review, Scottish Studies Review, and The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature. Colin Nicholson is professor of eighteenth-century and modern literature at Edinburgh University, where he teaches a course in modern and contemporary Scottish poetry. During the 1990s he edited the British Journal of Canadian Literature and is the author of Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity and Fivefathers: Interviews with Late Twentieth-Century Scottish Poets.

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