Robert Crawford

No anthology offers us the full spectrum of Scottish poetry, but Roderick Watson’s comes closer than any other. This is the first big, general anthology to offer us work in Gaelic, Scots and English (note the word order) from the medieval period to the present. Catherine Kerrigan’s Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (1991), Douglas Dunn’s Faber Book of 20th-century Scottish Poetry (1992), and Daniel O’Rourke’s Dream State; The New Scottish Poets (1994) all offer work in the three languages, but, as their titles indicate, select from specific sectors of Scottish poetry. When we compare Watson’s volume with its main competitors, the Penguin and Oxford anthologies, it is clear not only that these are out of date, but that they are products of an age when cultural imperialism among publishers seems to have demanded the exclusion of Gaelic verse.

Slouched there in the Aston Martin On its abattoir of upholstery

He escapes To the storming of the undersea missile silo,

The satellite rescue, the hydrofoil That hits the beach, becoming a car

With Q’s amazing state-of-the-art, State-of-the-art, state-of-the-art ...

Suddenly he has this vision Of a sperm in a boyhood sex-ed film

As a speargun-carrying, tadpole-flippered frogman Whose...

The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot’s parents, a religious poet and a businessman, produced between them a businessman-religious poet, and meant an enormous amount to him. Yet they scarcely figure in his poetry, while his criticism, obsessed with issues of inheritance, usually suggests that the kind of tradition that matters comes from books, not parents. Often Modernist poets seem embarrassed by Mum and Dad: Ezra Pound’s father, Homer, is displaced by his son’s epic poem. Pound is his own hero, lonely and supermannish. One has to turn to his biography to realise how much MacDiarmid’s family sustained him as he wrote such superb poems of isolation as ‘On a Raised Beach’. In Auden too, family can appear as weakness. Heredity, in various aspects of Modernist culture from Freud to eugenics, is a source of worry that becomes, eventually, a Nazi obsession.

Silence parked there like a limousine; We had no garage and we had no car.

Dad polished shoes, boiled kettles for hot-water bottles, And mother made pancakes, casseroles, lentil soup

On her New World cooker, its blue and cream Obsolete before I was born.

I was a late, only child, campaigning For 33 rpm records.

Dad brought food parcels from City Bakeries In crisp brown paper, tightly bound...