The Canongate Burns, ed Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg (Canongate, £14.99)

There's a splendid story in Helen Simpson's latest collection, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, in which the misery of a Burns Night spent among the affluent is vividly described. There's a great deal of drinking, a great deal of thoughtless misogyny, a great deal of sentimentality made all the more tawdry and bogus by an ignorance of Burns's poetry and beliefs. This brainless braggadoccio has made sensitive people steer clear of the man and his works, which is hardly fair. There is still enough time before Burns Night for both professional and amateur Scots to get this book and use it to bone up on their hero. You could spend £525 on William Scott Douglas's 2,000-page edition but this represents marginally better value for money, and you even get an editor whose middle name is "Scott", thus guaranteeing partisan authority.

Of course, this partisanship is an impediment to many south of the border, but it need not be so. As Seamus Heaney has justly observed, Burns is a world poet because of his genius, not because of his Scottishness. This point is tacitly adhered to by this edition, in that it annotates even the most penetrable aspects of his dialect. If you could neither know nor guess that "amang" means "among", that "twa" means "two", or that "nae" means "no" (did Scottish feminist students go on "nae means nae" marches during the 1980s, I wonder?) then you will find such words helpfully glossed in the margins here. (I have seen an edition where "Fittie-lan" - "a back left-hand plough-horse" - was unannotated, and I think it is better to err on the side of caution.)

You may well have an edition of Burns's poetry already. It is still worth getting this one. For not only is each significant poem followed by a mini-essay on the historical context and compositional circumstances (along with useful remarks from essays on the man by the likes of Edwin Muir), but large chunks of his correspondence are cited, too. This really is a bonus; for as Susan Manning noted, Burns often wrote more to amuse his correspondent than to say precisely what he meant. This may be a fine distinction, and unsupportable when he seems to spend so much time moaning about his lot, but it certainly means that we are always going to be entertained by him.

And entertainment, as much as political outrage and sheer cheek, was the name of Burns's game: in an age in which the wowsers, killjoys and pills among us would appear to be in the ascendant, those of us who like a bit of fun from time to time - and like to ally it to political radicalism - need Burns's verse more than ever. As to whether he was a misogynist, to declare he was is something of a perverse misreading. (His winning description of the Scottish Muse in "The Vision", her leg peeping through her tartan - "and such a leg!" - may by the strait-laced seem sexist, but it is more important than you may at first suspect that he dwells so much on her leg.)

Congratulations, then, to the Edinburgh-based Canongate. This is getting to be an increasingly authoritative imprint, and this edition does them great credit.