Hugh MacDiarmid's Selected Poetry is an invaluable introduction to the work of a major poet who, despite the enthusiasm of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, remains little known in the United States. MacDiarmid (1892-1978), universally recognized as the greatest Scottish poet since Robert Burns and the man responsible for reviving Scots as a literary language, was also the author of an enormous body of poems in English. As the noted critic and translator Eliot Weinberger writes of MacDiarmid's work in his introduction: "There is nothing like it in modern literature, nothing even close. It is an attempt to return poetry to its original role as repository for all that a culture knows about itself." Edited by Alan Riach and the poet's son Michael Grieve, the Selected Poetry draws generously from fifty years of work, and includes the complete text of MacDiarmid's 1926 masterpiece, "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle."

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Christopher Grieve, writing under the name of Hugh MacDiarmid, was a major modern poet and founder of the Scottish literary Renaissance. In this study of his poetry, John Baglow eliminates what has been a stumbling block for most MacDiarmid scholars by showing the very real thematic and psycological consistency which underlines MacDiarmid's work. He demonstrates the extent to which the work was dominated by a desire to find a faith that could justify his desire to write poetry, a desire continually thwarted by a critical intellect which destroyed whatever faith he was able to construct. This constant search without a successful conclusion is at the heart of the work of many major modernist writers; MacDiarmid's poetry can be seen as embracing this tradition and making it explicit.

Kenn returns to the Highlands of his youth, back to the river which has haunted his dreams since boyhood. Determined to walk all the way back to its source, Kenn embarks on a journey that will lead him deep into the wilderness of his own heart. Profound and moving, Highland River is a stirring tale of what is lost and what endures, and the unexpected ways we can be renewed.

Robert Burns is Scotland’s greatest cultural icon. Yet, despite his continued popularity, critical work has been compromised by the myths that have built up around him. McGuirk focuses on Burns’s poems and songs, analysing his use of both vernacular Scots and literary English to provide a unique reading of his work.

Heaney's ten lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, collected here in The Redress of Poetry, explore the poetry of a wide range of writers, from Christopher Marlowe to John Clare to Oscar Wilde. Whether he concentrates on moments in the works under discussion, or is concerned to advance his general subject, Heaney's insight and eloquence are themselves of poetic order.