This page gathers essays, book reviews and other reflections on poetry and fiction  written over the past three decades.

Poets’ Pub

Eight essays written for the Scottish Poetry Library’s website, considering the work of the poets represented in the painting Poets’ Pub (1980) by Alexander Moffat, and covering the decades from the 1920s to the 1990s. (2003)
MacDiarmid, Hugh – Sangschaw (1920s)
Maclean, Sorley – 17 Poems for 6d (1930s)
Smith Sydney Goodsir Under the Eildon Tree (1940s)
MacCaig, Norman – The Sinai Sort (1950s)
Morgan, Edwin – The Second Life (1960s)
Garioch, Robert – Doktor Faust in Rose Street (1970s)
Brown, George Mackay – The Wreck of the Archangel (1980s)
Smith, Iain Crichton – Ends and Beginnings (1990s)

Book Reviews

Notesbooks Canons and Damp Dustbins: W.S. Graham’s Aimed at Nobody and Basil Bunting’s Uncollected Poems  in Lines Review, no. 128 (1994)

Towards This Particular Place: Tom Leonard’s Places of the Mind in Verse, 11/1 (1994)

Articles

Dancing Visions: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Early Writing in Folio (2006)