Bard of Friendly Fire
Robert Crawford: The Radical Burns, 25 July 2002
Robert Burns: Poems
edited by Don Paterson.
Faber, 96 pp., £4.99, February 2001,0 571 20740 5 Show More
edited by Don Paterson.
Faber, 96 pp., £4.99, February 2001,
The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns
edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg.
Canongate, 1017 pp., £40, November 2001,0 86241 994 8 Show More
edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg.
Canongate, 1017 pp., £40, November 2001,
“... except as an ironic jab. Few poetic terms have shifted in significance so much. When, around 1500, William Dunbar called a rival Scottish poet an ‘Iersche brybour baird’, each word was a studied insult. ‘Iersche’ (Gaelic) was barbarous to Dunbar’s Lowland ear; a ‘brybour’ was a vagabond; a ‘baird’ was a limited sub-poet, not a ‘makar’. A ... ”