The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse
ed by Robert Crawford, Mick Imlah
554pp, Penguin
100 20th-Century Scottish Poems
ed by Douglas Dunn
96pp, Faber
£4.99
Buy it at BOL
No Great Mischief
Alistair MacLeod
262pp, Jonathan Cape
£15.99
Buy it at BOL
One of the best anthologies of all is John Buchan's The Northern Muse, a selection of verse in "the Scots vernacular". It appeared in 1924, at the very time when Hugh MacDiarmid was writing the lyrics in "synthetic Scots" that were to bring Buchan's taste into question. But there's hardly a piece in the book that doesn't give pleasure; Buchan chose only what he liked, and it shows. Pleasure, in the sense of editorial predilection, stands at the opposite pole of representativeness in the work of anthologists, who can seem to be facing a choice between putting in what they like and putting in what other people have liked (and what their friends have written). This doesn't mean that The Northern Muse fails as a record of what lots of people have liked, but Buchan is unScottishly keen, as some might think, on pleasuring himself.
Few of his choices are to be found in the New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse compiled by Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah, a selection more interested than Buchan's in inclusiveness. But this is a good book too: the poet editors are attentive to the verse of their contemporaries and to translations from Gaelic and Latin (excellent ones by Crawford himself, including a banishment "knee-deep in shite" to the croft and the plough, from the Latin of Shakespeare's contemporary Arthur Johnston). It has its "finds" and its serendipity, as in the case of gentle Allan Ramsay's little-known dying words or "Last Advice" of the granitic madam of an Edinburgh brothel.
The 16th century yields a find in the vengeful Mrs MacGregor of Glenstrae, on a clanship matter, a Campbell crime: "May sickness kill my father/ And Colin die of the plague." And 100 years on, there's Francis Sempill of Beltrees, whose Maggie Lauder is told by a passing piper: "My name is Rob the Ranter:/ The lassies loup as they were daft,/ When I blaw up my chanter." Marion Bernstein of Victorian Paisley is soundly opposed to blood sports, and there's a welcome MacGonagall.
The scarcity here of Buchan's selections testifies to the richness of the heritage and to a difference of opinion concerning the black hole which is often felt to have opened up in 19th-century Scottish literature, whose Kailyard school, with its vernacular and its rural settings, can be seen as a response to the subordination of Scots speech promoted by parliamentary union and urban and industrial development. MacDiarmid set himself to cut out the soft heart of the "mawkish" Kailyard, and the impact of his early poems drew Scotland towards modernist practice, where a dislike of Victorian sentimentality was routinely aired.
Country life of the sort embodied in Burns's poems, write the New Penguin editors, "shrank smartly into the margins as industry took root". Smartly? MacDiarmid spent most of his life in the country, and his early poems are set there. Writers and others went on living there, and the version of pastoral that arose during these dark years and on into the new century produced valuable poems, several of them by upper-class women. The accomplished Violet Jacob, daughter of the 18th Laird of Dun, is rife in Buchan, but not in the New Penguin or in Douglas Dunn's successive anthologies of Scottish verse.
Two of the most popular poems of the northern 19th century were James Hogg's "Kilmeny", in which a pure young girl goes to fairyland and experiences an overflight of Scotland and its history, and his friend William Laidlaw's "Lucy's Flittin". Extracts from "Kilmeny" are provided in the New Penguin. The Laidlaw, a Kailyard precursor dear to Buchan's project, is omitted. It is a fine poem, and an intensely sentimental one. Why does Servant Lucy leave everyone on the farm in tears? Two charged and equivocal lines may be the answer to that ("ettled" means meant, or ordained): "If I wasna ettled to be ony better,/ Then what gars me wish ony better to be?" Lucy may have been looking to improve herself.
Hogg's many poems are thinly represented here. I turned to "The Witch O' Fife" hoping for the exhilarating night-rider ballad of that name done in the synthetic, antique Scots he devised for his ballads. What I found was a lyrical appendage to this ballad with a sprinkling of Scots words. The editors sometimes seem a little leery of Scots. Stevenson's lively vernacular poems, of interest to Buchan, are not among the 10 of his that are picked (double the tally for Dunbar, but well worth picking, admittedly).
A selection by Douglas Dunn of 20th-century Scottish verse appeared towards the end of that century, in 1992. Here for the hip pocket is a digest of that anthology, 100 20th-Century Scottish Poems, with choices revised and a string of recent poems added. One recent poem by Donny O'Rourke, about a father who mends grandfather clocks, chimes with an earlier one by Angus Martin, who says "I am a Scottish wood collector" - two enjoyable occupational lyrics. Another appealing poem, Mick Imlah's "Goldilocks", is less straightforward. It is in both Dunns, but in the slim one stanzas absent from the parent anthology are restored or added. A galloping outdoors metre is applied to a state of inwardness, as the poet discovers a Scots-speaking tramp doppelgänger in his Oxford college bed. In the Dunn book of 1992 are four poems by Alasdair Maclean, a Highland poet from Fife who is cross at times, and Larkin-like. In the digest there are none, and none in the New Penguin either. This is a loss.
Another poet of that name is the Gael Sorley Maclean, whose symbolist elegy "Hallaig"- translated by himself from Gaelic into English - no anthologist of the period would be likely to leave out. It is one of the high points in Scottish literature of the last century, and a reminder of how complex, in one important respect, its achievements are: they are in more than one language and hail from more than one part of the world. All three of these anthologies acknowledge the existence of a Scottish diaspora and of a Scottish complexity.
Among the flowering of Scottish prose and poetry that has taken place in the last few years can be identified, without presumption or piracy, an unforgettable work of the last few weeks - the novel No Great Mischief by a Canadian of Gaelic stock, Alistair MacLeod. It's about family feeling and clanship, it prefers a harsh maritime countryside to the city, and it shares some of the starkness of Mrs MacGregor of Glenstrae. MacLeod's rural world - with its rigours and dangers, its duties and skills - also has something of the world of Odysseus. The sun moves on "its appointed journey" through the sky. Here is a lordless, lairdless Nova Scotian Ithaca. It is both a Canadian book and a Scottish book; there are moments when Gaelic utterance makes it bilingual. When the narrator's twin sister turns up in Scotland, she is recognised as one of theirs; she belongs "here". The heart is Highland.
Scots and English have been described as languages of the heart and the head respectively - categories mentioned in MacLeod's novel. It makes more sense to describe them as dialects of the same language. But it should also be said that this is a language of many dialects, both literary and demotic, and that in the work of many writers Scots and English are one.
