CELEBRATION of disorder makes memorable the best poems in Douglas Dunn’s The Noise of a Fly, his first book-length poetry collection in 17 years. It is there in the first four-line poem, Idleness: “The sigh of an exhausted garden ghost./A poem trapped in an empty fountain pen.”
RISKING the charge of condescension towards readers of The National may this reviewer, an Irishman, first give his understanding of the title. A “kist” according to MacDiarmid’s 1940 Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry and Tom Hubbard’s The New Makers (1991) can become the soft English word “chest”. Though Alexander Scott in Modern Scots Verse 1922-1977, and J Derrick McClure in this book, offers an alarming alternative, “coffin”. “Skinklan” is more universally and cheerfully accepted as an evocative term for “sparkling”. I’m going to settle for Treasure Chest. The Book is subtitled “An Anthology of Scots poetry from the first and second waves of the Scottish Renaissance”.
THE WINTER BOOK By Alan Riach Luath Press, £8.99
