Accent O the Mind

The joy, the pain, the fear, the anger and the shame - topical and contemporary, and mostly in vibrant Scots, this is Scottish poetry at its best. Encompassing history, text messaging, politics, asylum-seeking hedgehogs and Buckfast, Rab Wilson covers the variety of modern Scottish life through refreshingly honest and often humorous poetry.

Accent O the Mind follows on from Rab Wilson's ground-breaking translation into Scots of the Persian epic, The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam, with a Scots translation of selected Horace satires. It also includes sonnets inspired by the Miners' Strike of 1984-85; poems he scribed as a Wigtown Bard; and the fascinating results of being twinned with his local MSP. This inspirational new collection consolidates Rab Wilson's position as one of Scotland's most charismatic poets and plays a part in the reinvigoration of the Scots language in modern Scottish society.

Reviews: 

Our traditional language could hardly have a more eloquent exponent. LESLEY DUNCAN

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.