100 Favourite Scottish Poems... Or Are They?

Intended as a tie-in with a Radio Scotland survey to find Scotland's most fondly remembered verses, 100 Favourite Scottish Poems (Luath Press), though not quite what it says on the tin, is an enjoyable rattle bag of poems old and new. Editor Stewart Conn has included 20 or so poems from the poll and topped the volume up to the 100 mark with his own choices.

100 Favourite Scottish Poems

Edited by Stewart Conn

As shown by the BBC's Nation's Favourite anthologies, favourite does not always equate with quality. People have an odd habit of coming to love the poems they hated when they were drummed into them during schooldays (see 'If', 'Dover Beach', 'Drake's Drum' and all). Scotland's Top Twenty is an odd bunch. Some are poor: 'Cuddle Doon', a mawkish piece of Victorian doggerel; one of Tom Leonard's squibs; 'The Jeelie Piece Song' which, for crying out loud, isn't even a poem! But there are some good selections among the survey choices (Burns and MacDiarmid of course, but also a few modern poets such as Kathleen Jamie and Liz Lochhead).

It is, of course, traditional, when reviewing anthologies to carp over what's missing, and here we can blame the public, rather than the editor. So where is Edwin Muir's 'The Horses'? And Carol Ann Duffy's 'Prayer'? The latter is so ubiquitous that is has almost become the ur-poem for our times. Perhaps the Scots don't consider Duffy Scottish enough (Stewart Conn has included her second most ubiquitous number, 'Warming Her Pearls' to make amends).

In his intro, Stewart mentions the lack of ballads among the public's choices, and offers a few classics among his own selections. Although I wouldn't have wished the volume full of bairnsangs, I could have done with a few more of those worthy staples from childhood recitation competitions: 'The Sair Finger', 'The Boy in the Train' and at least one of JK Annand's comic verses.

The interest for me lies in seeing what this editor has picked and weighing up what different selections I would have made. Sometimes, he makes weel-kent selections to represent poets (Henderson's The Freedom Come-All-Ye', Fergusson's 'Auld Reekie'). At other times, he seems to let personal favourites overrule any notional, national preference. 'Tundra's Edge', a clumsy early sonnet from a book since renounced by its author, is an odd way to represent John Burnside. Similar business with 'To Alexander Graham', which I can't imagine being anyone's favourite WS Graham piece, given the fabulous opposition.

But this approach of not choosing the obvious pays dividends, of course, and makes sure the book is not just another copycat Scottish Treasury. I was delighted to find a lovely Iain Crichton Smith sonnet ('Luss Village') which was new to me, and an exquisite and unusual piece called 'Young Harper' by Valerie Gillies, with which I shot off to my poetry class to show my students how to handle syntactical shift.

The volume's strength lies in the breadth of work here. Though Conn has sometimes picked pieces for their Scottish subject matter, he – as does each editor of a Scottish anthology – knows better than to try to offer any unified national identity through the medium of verse. Sometimes, however, neat thematic links appear, poem to poem. The book might better be called 50 Favourites and 50 Surprises, and that's no bad thing!