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Sceptical Scot

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For future generations from our here and now

March 9, 2022 by Fay Young Leave a Comment

Apricot Blossom: image Simon Williams CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Survival, war, poetry. What is it like to fight for your motherland with words and on the streets? Here is a message to transcend time and place.

Poems for the dawn

June 15, 2021 by Gordon Munro Leave a Comment

Dawn filtering through woodland

Here is truth that we need to hear and confront in this viral age. Gordon Munro finds it in new work by Ben Okri and Marianne Faithfull

Doses of compassion from the doctor-poet

January 16, 2021 by Fay Young Leave a Comment

Melting ice drips into a foaming stream. Pond Cottage image Ray Perman

“If it is our mission…to alleviate suffering as well as to preserve life …” 
The crystal-clear words of doctor-poet Gael Turnbull feel like a timely gift in our time of need.

On the threshold: songs and poems for a Covid-safe Christmas

December 6, 2020 by Fay Young 8 Comments

Covid has closed the doors at least for now.  But, there’s death-defying joy in Michael Marra’s song, a lockdown escape to be played loud and long.  Here’s Frida Kahlo cutting an intoxicatingly exotic dash dancing to Perdido among the locals in the singer’s favourite bar.  

Love and light: poetry and prose in the time of coronavirus

October 3, 2020 by Fay Young Leave a Comment

Starry night sky

It’s abut humanity. Vision is the theme of #NationalPoetryDay 20-20 and our co-editor Fay finds solace and joy and sadness in poetry and prose written in the time of coronavirus

Making music – and poetry

May 30, 2020 by David Gow Leave a Comment

Reading poetry in the pandemic is waxing, as people turn to verse for solace amidst their grief or for expressions of their own anger at needless suffering and death. We are not supposed to call the struggle to contain, suppress and/or beat the coronavirus a war yet it is to war poets people often reach […]

Strictly street dancing: a poem for a pandemic

May 16, 2020 by Fay Young Leave a Comment

Coronavirus brings powerful new poignancy to a remarkable poetry collection gathered by Edinburgh’s former Makar, Christine De Luca to celebrate “those who daily undertake some of the lesser-seen jobs in our city…night bus drivers, lollipop ladies, binmen…now on the ‘frontline’

Remembering Edwin Morgan at 100

May 2, 2020 by James McGonigal Leave a Comment

Edwin Morgan became Scotland’s first makar in 2004: a tribute to him on his centenary from his biographer. ‘He was an acrobat of words and identities. Perhaps his own identity as a gay man, risking censure or imprisonment through most of his life, encouraged that ability to shape-shift.’

Being 90: a poem for a pandemic

May 2, 2020 by Fay Young 1 Comment

‘Perversely, in the wars evoked by politicians it was the flaming of youth untimely snuffed out. Such thoughts emerge from a new poem, written before the pandemic, the reflections of a man in his tenth decade, walking by the river near his home. And wondering…’

Address to a coronavirus

March 31, 2020 by Gordon Peters 1 Comment

“…the hale podium of panjandrums/ wha think they ken hoo tae run things…” including from their beds of isolation…with nods to Burns and the English Bard

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