by Colin Waters (Editor) - £11.95 Vagabond Voices (2014)
paperback
ISBN 13: 9781908251350 | ISBN 10: 1908251352
Throw a stone in Edinburgh or Glasgow today and you’ll hit a young poet. The Scottish spoken word scene has exploded, reaching a level of popularity last seen in the late 1970s, another era, coincidentally, when the issue of Scottish self-determination was in the air. A generation of poets has emerged who have grown up in an age of change, political and technological, with the internet providing them not only with new ways of sharing writing – through their websites, podcasts, Twitter – but also in some cases with a subject too.
Be The First to Like This: New Scottish Poetry is the first attempt to capture the spirit of a diverse scene where every poet is their own movement – from McGuire’s hilarious deconstructions of sexuality to Michael Pedersen’s dole-office blues; from William Letford’s building-site tales to MacGillivray’s mystic cowboys. It’s a scene where you are just as liable to encounter ancient gods as you are video game characters; Richard Branson as you are Dolly the Sheep. Be The First to Like This features forty poets, mostly under-forty who have made Scotland their home. It’s a survey, a yearbook, a celebration and a promise of things to come.
(Price & availability last checked: July 2020)
In booklists: World Poetry - Scotland,
In categories: Poetry & Writing, Ireland, Scotland & Wales,
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