The Scottish poet Robert Burns has been idolised and eulogised. He has been sainted, painted, tarted up and toasted. He is famous as the author of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and he has long since become the patron saint of the heart-sore and the hung-over. But what about the poems? Beneath the cult of Burns’ Nights and patriotic yawps, there is the work itself, among the purest and most truthful created in any age. This is a Burns collection like no other: a reader’s edition, made for the pleasure of reading. Novelist and Scottish essayist Andrew O’Hagan comes into company with the poet who has mattered most to him in his writing life. He selects the poems for the reader, and converses with the work, offering fragments and distilled commentary of his own. The effect is explosive, giving us Robert Burns at his very best – a political Burns, a poet who can name hypocrisy and intolerance, and point directly to the human heart.
The Reviews
The way Burns sounded, his choice of words, his rhymes and metaphors, all that collapsed the distance I expected to feel between myself and the schoolbook poetry I encountered first at Anahorish Elementary School...He did not fail the Muse or us or himself as one of poetry's chosen instruments.Seamus Heaney
âPeople who find it hard to get into Robert Burns have the answer to their prayers with this book. Here are The Greatest Poems presented in a way that Burns himself would have enjoyed -- letting the poems chime and rhyme with the debates that surround us in the world today. Somebody clever once said that poetry helps you to live your life, and here is Burns at his most helpful, in conversation with a Scottish writer who loves him, Andrew O'Hagan. I think the book will change a lot of people's attitude to poetry.â
Ewan McGregor
Hardback
256 pages
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 9781841959924 Other editions
Paperback
Robert Burns (1759-1796)
Along with Walter Scott, Robert Burns is probably the best known Scottish writer in the world. His life story is often represented as one of sexual and alcoholic excess. Perhaps less well known is the political turmoil of the time, and the physical hardships which he endured, which at one point led him to contemplate emigrating to Jamaica. It was the success of his published poetry that helped change his mind, and he went on to be lionised by Edinburgh society and the literary establishment, as much a misunderstood and sentimentalised "heaven-taught ploughman" as the Ettrick Shepherd. Like James Hogg, Burns wrote scathing satirical poetry such as Holy Willie's Prayer in which he scorned religious bigots and hypocrits.
