Chuckies fir the Cairn

About the Book: 

Scotland has built great literature out of its richly textured language. Like the stones bound together in a wall, the poets linkied here by location and shared language embody the beauty of their country and the passion 'pulsin through its heirt'. These Dumfries and Galloway poets, free in their own inimitable styles and approaches, are bound together by the unique culture of Scotland. Their poems help to raise the wall of that culture in the modern world.

Reviews: 

The poets Rab Wilson has gathered in this anthology represent and important and often neglected strand in contemporary Scottish poetry. Native Scots-speaking poets whose chosen language is distinct from English and expressive beyond the capacities of that sister-language, they are committed to their country, their place and the people who inhabit the world beside them. However, earthed and native as they are, there is nothing narrowing or oversimplified here. ALAN RIACH

The range and liveliness of the poems are a testament to the continuing vitality of the Scots language in Dumfries and Galloway. THE HERALD

About the Author:

RAB WILSON is one of Scotland’s most accomplished poets. He was born in New Cumnock, Ayrshire in 1960. After an engineering apprenticeship with the National Coal Board he left the pits following the miner’s strike of 1984–5 to become a psychiatric nurse. As a Scots poet, his work appears regularly in The Herald, Chapman, Lallans and Markings magazines and he is the author of a number of highly praised volumes of poetry and a Burns scholar.

Rab has performed his work at the Edinburgh Festival, the StAnza poetry festival at St Andrews, the ‘Burns an a’ That Festival’ at Ayr and has been ‘Bard of the Festival’ at Wigtown, Scotland’s National Booktown. Additionally Rab is a previous winner of the McCash Poetry Prize and was ‘Robert Burns Writing Fellow – In Reading Scots’ for Dumfries and Galloway Region. He has worked with the artist Calum Colvin on a book of responses to Burns and he is the Scriever in Residence for the National Trust for Scotland based at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Ayr. Currently a member of the National Committee for the Scots Language Resource Centre, Rab regularly attends the parliamentary Cross Party Group for Scots language held at Holyrood. He is a ‘weel-kent’ advocate for Scots writing. He lives in New Cumnock with his wife Margaret and daughter Rachel.