Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

Commonwealth Poets United was an international exchange between six Scottish poets and poets from six Commonwealth nations. Toni Stuart is a South African poet named in the Mail and Guardian's list of 200 Inspiring Young South Africans for her work in co-founding I Am Somebody! – an NGO that uses storytelling and youth development to build integrated communities. Rachel McCrum, originally from Northern Ireland, is a poet and the co-creator of popular spoken word event Rally and Broad (2012-2016). Both poets visited each other's countries to draw inspiration from a different culture. When Toni was visiting Scotland, she came into the Scottish Poetry Library with Rachel to talk about their exchange trips, how food united them, and how ‘when you learn a new language, you gain a new soul'.

In August 2014, our then regular podcast host Colin Waters travelled to Faslane, home of the UK's nuclear deterrent, to talk to poet Gerry Loose. Loose's collection fault line is a suite of poems inspired by the area, which is his backyard. The great natural beauty contrasts with the ugliness of the military base, inspiring Loose. He guides Colin around the area, sharing its history and his thoughts on the nature poetry's radical past and present.

This edition of our Nothing But The Poem podcast, hosted as usual by Samuel Tongue, features two poems by Isabelle Baafi, from her 2025 Forward Prize winning debut collection Chaotic Good. ‘In this wise-hearted and deft debut, Baafi gets to the grain of family, inheritance, the grit of growing up and the grappling to become oneself.' - Rachel Long ‘Isabelle Baafi's Chaotic Good is a debut of amazing endurance. Its formal pressures create a kind of kaleidoscopic intensity that – with each turn of the chamber – brings newly beautiful and painful shapes into focus. - Will Harris The two poems discussed in the podcast from Chaotic Good are The Cottage and Burst Me Into Song

Hugo Williams won the 1999 TS Eliot Prize for Billy's Rain, a collection that captured a certain amount of journalistic interest for its unvarnished depiction of an affair. His collection, I Knew The Bride, was also been nominated for the TS Eliot Prize (as well as the Forward), although it's subject matter is a little darker, taking in the death of his sister and his own kidney failure, which requires him to spend a significant amount of time every week on dialysis. We were lucky to spend time with the poet in 2014 when he was up for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. He talks about the influence of popular music on his work, mortality, and what Hardy was doing with Shelley's heart.

When we think of World War One, our images of the conflict are largely shaped by those of the Western Front or perhaps Gallipoli. It was a truly global conflict, however, and one less remarked upon campaign was that of an ill-fated Anglo-Indian force dispatched to secure oil supplies in what is, today, southern Iraq.  Poet, playwright and songwriter Jenny Lewis' father fought as part of that force. Her collection Taking Mesopotamia (Carcanet) re-imagines the campaign using her father's diaries. It also takes in more recent wars in the region as well as the story of Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian warrior king, to create a vision of a mankind that repeatedly fails to learn the lessons of war. Lewis took time out from the StAnza poetry festival, where she was appearing in March 2014,to talk to us about war, oil, myth, and the gods. Photo by Ben Prestney

The latest edition of our Nothing But The Poem podcast, hosted as usual by Samuel Tongue, features two poems by Juana Adcock. Samuel Tongue comments: "Juana Adcock is a poet who works between languages and registers and themes, ever inventive and risk-taking. In this all too brief intro to two of her poems, I hope you get a sense of all of these elements. And please come and borrow her books from the SPL." Liz Lochhead said of her first collection Split: "Here is sharp specificity, humour, daring. These poems rock. They sing." The two poems discussed in the podcast are The Task of the Translator and The Guitar's Lament.

J.L. Williams is a poet fascinated by the possibility of metamorphosis, whether it be witnessed in the natural world or experienced in one's own life. Her first collection Condition of Fire (Shearsman) was inspired by Ovid, and in her second collection Locust and Marlin (Shearsman) she returns to the theme of change from a fresh perspective. In this 2014 podcast, she talks to us about the nature of stone, the poetry of locusts, and just how spiritual she is. Photo by Chris Scott.

On Monday 19th November 2018 the poet Tony Harrison took part in a special event at Edinburgh Filmhouse. It was a rare public appearance from harrison which consisted of a conversation with his friend and collaborator Peter Symes, intercut with screeings of Harrison's film poems. These film poems hadn't been seen in public since they were originally screened on BBC and Channel 4 in the 80s and 90s. The event was organised by the Scottish Poetry Library in partnership with Edinburgh Filmhouse, and curated by David McLachan. The discussion, including the extracts from the film poems was recorded and the audio has been digitised as part of the SPL's extensive archive. The recording quality wasn't great but thanks to the tech we have at out disposal we've managed to clean up the audio, get rid of most background noises. So here for the first time, in podcast format, is the full discussion between Tony Harrison and Peter Symes, with the film poem extracts left in. Enjoy.

2014 marked the bicentenary of the birth of the Russian novelist and poet Mikhail Lermontov. A book, After Lermontov, featured a number of the Russian's poems translated into English. Many of the poets involved are Scottish because Lermontov traced his ancestry back to Scotland and was a great admirer of Ossian and Sir Walter Scott. This podcast from 2014 looks at After Lermontov in the company of its editor and contributors: Peter France, Robert Crawford, Sasha Dugdale and Alexander Hutchison. We also take a look at the short, turbulent life of the poet, a controversial figure in his day who may have been the victim of a fatal conspiracy at the age of 27. Image: lino_Lermontov by Andrey under a Creative Commons licence

In 2014 Niall Campbell was described as one of the most promising poets of the younger generation of Scottish writers. Hailing from the island of South Uist in the Western Isles, Campbell is a poet whose work is as lyrical as it is intriguing. After the publication of his debut collection Moontide (Bloodaxe), Campbell took time to talk to the SPL about growing up on an island, his interest in spirituality without God, and the similarities between sculpture and poetry.

On a sun-kissed Autumn's afternoon on the banks of the River Nith two National Poets sat down to chat about Rabbie Burns, Bob Marley, Dante's Inferno, the Gaelic and Jamaican tongues, and much more besides. In this special edition of the SPL podcast, Scotland's current Makar, Peter Mackay, and the former Poet Laureate of Jamaica, Lorna Goodison, exchanged poems, stories, thoughts and much laughter at Ellisland Farm, once home to Robert Burns and his family, where he famously composed such works as Auld Lang Syne and Tam o' Shanter. The conversation took place during the poets' four day residency at the Ellisland Farm Burns Museum: who the Scottish Poetry Library partnered with to help bring the two national poets together for this unique collaboration. What unfolds in this fascinating and generous conversation is an exploration of seemingly disparate cultures and languages, that may be closer than we at first think. We can also report that Peter Mackay and Lorna Goodison got on like the proverbial house on fire!

Sheena Blackhall is a poet, novelist, short story writer, illustrator, traditional storyteller and singer who is the author, as the podcast explores, of over 100 poetry pamphlets. In 2009, she was made Aberdeen's City Makar. She writes in English, Scots and Doric. As a child and native speaker of Doric she faced the same prejudices and challenges that speakers of minority languages around the world have faced. In this 2015 podcast, Sheena talks about her love of Aberdeen, the worst place she's ever written a poem and why she's written so many pamphlets. If you would prefer to read, rather than listen to, our podcast with Sheena Blackhall, click here to see a transcript of the interview.

In 2014 presenter Ryan Van Winkle talked with poet Caroline Bird after her reading at The Sutton Gallery in Edinburgh. She discussed her collection The Hat-Stand Union and read a couple of her poems. She also talked about the importance of reading for a poet and how an Arvon course she attended when she was 13 persuaded her to transform her reading habits. It obviously worked as she published her first collection at just 15 years of age. Produced by Colin Fraser.

In November 2012, we staged the first in a new series of My Life in Poetry events at the Scottish Poetry Library. My Life in Poetry invites guests to reflect upon their lives through the lens of their favourite poems. Award-winning novelist Candia McWilliam did the SPL the great honour of accepting its invitation to take part. For 30 minutes, she discusses-with enviable lucidity-her favourite poems, which includes verse by Shakespeare, George Herbert, Robert Browning and Emily Dickinson.

Fiona Sampson is an award-winning poet whose honours include the Cholmondeley Award and Newdigate Prize, as well as being shortlisted twice for both the T.S Eliot Prize and for the Forward Prize. She is the author of 2010's Rough Music and (in 2012 when this was recorded) the soon-to-be-published Coleshill. She took time out during her appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to talk to Jennifer Williams ahead of the publication of her latest collection and Poem, the new magazine she has begun.

In this podcast, recorded in August 2013 during the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Glyn Maxwell reads poems from his collection Pluto (Picador) and talks with Jennifer Williams about the breath and blood of poetry, how actors are the best first readers, why Auden is so important to his work and much more. Photo by David Shankbone.

Our resident podcast host, Samuel Tongue, speaks with the Dundee poet Taylor Dyson about her work and her appointment as the new Dundee and Angus Scots Scriever, based at the National Library of Scotland. The residency aims to support the creation of original writing in Scots, as well as the promotion of the language with communities throughout Scotland.  The conversation touches on the local poetry scene in and around Dundee, language and the distinctive Dundee tongue, the intersection of class and poetry, and Taylor's work in theatre as well as a performance poet. Taylor also reads her poem Tae Dundee: which first featured in her one woman show Ain City.

Judy Brown's first book, Loudness (Seren, 2011) was shortlisted for the 2011 Forward Felix Dennis prize for best first collection. Jennifer Williams met her in 2012 to discuss how she approaches poetry, using her poem ‘Spontaneous Combustion' as a way into her work and methods of composition. Thanks to Andrew Forster and the Wordsworth Trust. Photo by Chloe Barter.

In this longer-than-usual podcast from 2013, Jennifer Williams talks to Kay Ryan, American poet, educator and 16th United States Poet Laureate. Kay was a 2011 MacArthur Fellow, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, among many other awards and accolades. She was in Edinburgh to read at the Edinburgh International Book Festival as part of a tour including Snape Maltings Concert Hall in Aldeburgh and Dromineer Literature Festival. Before Jennifer and Kay headed out to conquer Arthur's Seat and to sample Kay's very first can of Irn-Bru, they read and discussed a number of poems from Kay's Odd Blocks-Selected and New Poems (Carcanet). They also talked about such varied topics as Buddhism, cycling across America, ‘cool' poetry, the ticklish delights of rhyme and much more.

Jennifer Williams talks with Griffin Award Winning Canadian poet Ken Babstock about ‘the thingyness of things', Paul Muldoon, the weather, Canadian garrison mentality's effect on the work of Canadian writers and much more, including his own extraordinary poems. This interview is from StAnza 2013, and takes place in a tiny attic room at the top of the Town Hall, in the midst of all sorts of weather. Ken Babstock's 2011 collection, Methodist Hatchet (Anansi) won The Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry and was a finalist for The Trillium Book Award. He lives in Toronto. Image: Ken Babstock, Toronto by Steve McLaughlin, under a Creative Content licence

In this 2014 podcast Jennifer Williams talks to two Hawthornden Fellows: Lynn Davidson and Alyson Hallett about where they come from, loneliness versus aloneness, and their current and upcoming work. Lynn Davidson's fiction and poetry has appeared in journals and her short fiction has been broadcast on national radio. Davidson has received several grants and fellowships to develop her work, including the 2003 Louis Johnson New Writers' Bursary from Creative New Zealand. She has published collections of poetry, and her novel Ghost Net was released in 2003. Davidson also works as an educator and tutors short fiction and poetry both online and in the classroom. Alyson Hallett‘s work spans different continents and art forms. She has a poem carved into Milsom Street pavement in Bath, words etched into glass in a library in Bristol, and she runs the international poetry and public art project The Migration Habits of Stones. She currently works as a Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund. Prior to this, she was a Leverhulme-funded poet-in-residence in the University of Exeter's Geography Department. In 2010, she completed a practice-based PhD in Poetry and Geographical Intimacy. She lives in Falmouth, Cornwall. Suddenly Everything is her second full volume of poetry. The Lynne Davidson photo is by Murray Wilson. The Alyson Hallett photo is by Paul Wilkinson.  

“I feel poets have saved my life. The poets are our companions. They have found words for states all of us have experienced.” So said Marie Howe on a 2012 visit to Scotland, where she was appearing as a guest of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Howe's first collection, The Good Thief (1988), was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood, who praised Howe's ‘poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots'. Jennifer Williams interviews Howe about the craft of writing poetry, focussing on her poems ‘The Star Market' and ‘The Snow Storm'. Image: Untitled by T.Carrigan, under a Creative Commons licence

In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to Robert Wrigley about his collection and first book to be published in the UK, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe). They also touch on narrative in poetry, the infinite capacity of poetry to talk about love and, wild horses on the southern plains of Idaho.  Robert was at the SPL in November 2013 for a reading with John Burnside.  The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems draws on several collections published in the US, including Beautiful Country (2010); Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (2006); Lives of the Animals (2003), winner of the Poets Prize; Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; and In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets.

In this Nothing But The Poem podcast, our usual host Samuel Tongue, with the SPL Friends Group, take a look at two poems from Mick Imlah. In a Guardian obituary, Alan Hollinghurst wrote that, when he died, Mick Imlah was mourned as one of the outstanding British poets of his time. He was also a particularly Scottish poet of distinction and his final collection The Lost Leader, according to Robert Crawford, came "as a revelation, showing just how much he had accomplished. Running the gamut of Scottish literature and history, the poems confidently yet often elegiacally re-imagine material from Columban Iona to modern times." (Scotsman obituary, 21 January 2009). The two poems read, enjoyed and analysed are Iona and London Scottish. Both can be found on the SPL website.

We met up with Sean Borodale at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2012, where he was reading from his debut collection Bee Journal, which was subsequently shortlisted for the 2012 T S Eliot prize and Costa Book Awards. Here Sean reads poems from Bee Journal, a remarkable account of the two years he kept a bee hive. He likens the way in which he jotted his poems down to documentary film-making rather than to traditional methods of poetry composition. Borodale also talks with Jennifer Williams about his interest in time, bees, Virgil and much more. Image (copyright) Mark Vessey.  

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams talks to Polish poet, essayist, editor and critic Tadeusz Dąbrowski. They are joined by Kasia Kokowska of Interaktywny Salon Piszących w Szkocji, who came along to help with translating. Taseusz has been the winner of numerous awards, among others, the Kościelski Prize (2009), the Hubert Burda Prize (2008) and, from Tadeusz Różewicz, the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Culture (2006). In 2013, he was the author of six volumes of poetry, and edited the anthology Poza słowa. Tadeusz has been widely published and translated into 20 languages, and a collection of his poetry in English, Black Square, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, was published by Zephyr Press in 2011. He lives in Gdańsk and says in this interview, ‘All art is something like self-recognition.' Photo by Harvard Review.

The prize-winning and former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Naomi Shihab Nye is the subject of this month's Nothing But The Poem podcast.    Known for poetry that lends a fresh perspective to ordinary events, people, and objects, Nye has said that, for her, “the primary source of poetry has always been local life, random characters met on the streets, our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.” (Poetryfoundation.org)   Our resident podcast host Sam Tongue selected Supple Cord and Blood. Find out what Sam – and the Friends Of The SPL group – took from these poems in this Nothing But The Poem podcast.

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams discusses constructivist poetry and more with award-winning poet, fiction writer, critic and professor Tony Lopez at a rather noisy 2012 Edinburgh International Book Festival.  Tony reads from his book Only More So and talks about upcoming projects. (from Wikipedia): Tony Lopez (born 1950) is an English poet who first began to be published in the 1970s. His writing was at once recognised for its attention to language, and for his ability to compose a coherent book, rather than a number of poems accidentally printed together. He is best known for his book False Memory (The Figures, 1996), first published in the United States and much anthologised.

On 15 February 2013, Jennifer Williams and poet/author Tracey S. Rosenberg had a chat about that dreaded and unavoidable demon that every publishing writer must do battle with: rejection.  We hope this podcast will be of interest to all writers who have to deal with inevitable rejection, and especially to young and emerging writers who are starting down the challenging path towards publication.  Music by James Iremonger. Photo by Chris Scott.

The multidimensional Kenyan poet, filmmaker and writer Ngwatilo Mawiyoo is the subject of this month's Nothing But The Poem podcast. Keguro Macharia, in The New Inquiry, writes that Ngwatilo's poetry "draws out my own memories [which] speaks to its generative power: its particularity is generous, opening ways for readers to encounter and inhabit it." Hers is a voice that insists on the personal and political being unified. Our resident podcast host Sam Tongue selected: Found: Portrait Of Umau's Early Days, Found: Eulogy For My Father and Night Swim. Find out what Sam – and the Friends Of The SPL group – took from these poems in this Nothing But The Poem podcast.

Who was Eddie Linden (1935-2023)? A poet, an editor, and a man with an extraordinary range of contacts and friends who ranged from Tom Leonard to Harold Pinter. Linden was a person who achieved much considering his incredibly tough childhood. Born illegitimate, he was passed from pillar to post as a boy in Glasgow. Later, he suffered much anguish when his Roman Catholicism conflicted with his sexuality. In the 1960s, after moving to London, he began an extraordinary literary magazine Aquarius, which-over 30 years-became a veritable Who's Who of contemporary poets. In this 2013 podcast, he discussed his life and verse from his home in Maida Vale. Image by Mazengarb

Born in Budapest and brought up in England after coming to the UK as a refugee in 1956, George Szirtes has remained one of the country's most interesting poets since his first prize-winning collection, The Slant Door, was published in 1979. That wasn't the last trophy he was to take home; he won the T S Eliot Prize for his 2005 collection Reel. The SPL caught up with Szirtes at the StAnza poetry festival in March, 2013. In town to read from his collection Bad Machine (Bloodaxe), he spoke to Colin Waters about memory, photography, Twitter and 1960s garage pop. Photo by Caroline Forbes.

Good poetry gets beneath the skin of readers. This episode features a poet who, for a short period, literally got ‘under the skin'. In the autumn of 2008, poet and essayist Marianne Boruch was awarded a ‘Faculty Fellowship in a Second Discipline', permitting her to study something new for a semester. Her choice? Anatomy classes. ‘Cadaver, Speak', a long poem, was her response to her time dissecting bodies, and in this 2013 podcast, she talks about her experiences in an interview conducted in the Edinburgh University Medical School's historical lecture theatre.

In 1972, Liz Lochhead published her debut collection, Memo For Spring, a landmark in Scottish literature. In an extended interview with Colin Waters, the then Scots Makar discusses what the early 1970s poetry scene she emerged into was like, one in which women poets were few and far between. She recalls early meetings with the elder generation – Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch – and with contemporaries such as Tom Leonard, James Kelman and Alasdair Gray. She also speaks about life during the era of the three-day week and compares it with an economically troubled present-day that, in some respects, mirrors 1972. And she reads several poems from Memo For Spring. Photo by Norman McBeath.

In 2013, Edinburgh-born Ross Sutherland was described as one of the most interesting young poets working in Britain. Inspired by cut-ups and technology, his collection Emergency Window (Penned in the Margins) featured a sequence of classic poems fed through Google Translate many times until they become something else entirely. He wrote a sequence of sonnets about the characters in the video game Street Fighter 2, and yet his work is never gimmicky or unemotional. Ross talked to the SPL about the hairstyles of millionaires, how John Cooper Clarke inspired him, and about taking part in one of the more unusual poetry readings of the time. Photo by James Lyndsay.

In this episode of Nothing But The Poem podcast, our usual host Samuel Tongue goes in deep on two weel kent poems by Norman MacCaig, one of Scotland's most loved and influential poets. Norman MacCaig famously, and self-deprecatingly, described writing his poems as "one fag" poems or "two fag" poems. Nothing could be further from the truth for readers, who can spend hours returning again and again to his best work. The two poems featured here are generally considered among Maccaig's finest. Rich in observation with similes to die for Aunt Julia is often rated as MacCaig's most popular poem, with it's famous opening lines:   Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic very loud and very fast.   Stars and Planets is the other poem featured in this podcast. A short cosmic stunner of a poem with more of MacCaig's surprising similes and deft observations. Samuel Tongue and the Friends of the SPL group had fun discussing these two poems as they looked beneath the bonnets of both.  

Iain Sinclair is one of the UK's greatest living writers. Famed for his novels, such as Downriver, and documentary prose, of which London Orbital is perhaps the best known, Sinclair began his career self-publishing his own poetry on his Albion Village Press in the 1970s. 2013 saw the publication of three books – two poetry collections and a longer book on his relationship with the Beats, American Smoke. Colin Waters travelled to Sinclair's home in Hackney, where he asked Sinclair about his Scottish roots, John Clare and his lost 1970s collection Red Eye, which was being published by Test Centre. Picture of Iain Sinclair by Luca Del Baldo.

We have all heard the arguments in favour of Scotland's best poet or favourite poem, but what about its greatest collection? In this recording from 2012, the SPL invited two guests – James Robertson, poet, publisher and author of the novels And the Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack, and Dorothy McMillan, editor of Modern Scottish Women Poets and former Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow – to join then SPL director Robyn Marsack to discuss what might be Scotland's best collections of poetry in an extended podcast. Image: Seaweed by Lucy Burnett

Anita Govan has been involved in performance poetry for many years, long before it became as widespread as it is today, both as a performer and an organiser of events. Sceptical of the competitive aspects of slams, she still takes part in them and organises them for young people as she recognises their part in giving people a forum in which to share their experiences. In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to Govan about her time as the Stirling Makar, coping with dyslexia, and standing up for young people.

The Written World was the Scottish Poetry Library's London 2012 project. To mark the Olympics, we launched a scheme to find a poem for each of the 204 countries taking part, which were then broadcast on BBC Radio. In October 2012, with the project over, we took the chance to look back on The Written World with its project manager Sarah Stewart. We also talked to Richard Price, whose poem ‘Hedge Sparrows' was chosen to represent Team GB, and William Letford, who the SPL asked to write a poem marking the end of the tournament. A trio of poets is rounded out by Mariama Khan, a poet representing Gambia at Poetry Parnassus, another international event linked to the Olympics.

Aonghas MacNeacail (1942-2022) was a leading voice in Gaelic poetry for decades, as poet, and as a regular literary commentator in print and on Gaelic radio. To celebrate his seventieth birthday in 2012 he published a new selected poems, Laughing at the Clock / Déanamh Gáire Ris A' Chloc. MacNeacail came into the SPL in 2013 to talk about his life and career, from his childhood in Uig on the Isle of Skye to his membership of Philip Hobsbaum's legendary writing group. He also talked about his struggles as a Gaelic speaker in an English language-dominated culture, including an oddly strenuous struggle with the telephone directory people.

Bob Dylan has played many roles in his life: voice of a generation, rock ‘n' roll Judas, Christian convert, even Victoria's Secret salesman. The one that concerned the SPL podcast in 2013 was ‘poet'. Across two biographies – Once Upon A Time and Time Out of Mind (both Mainstream) – Ian Bell (1956-2015) considered Dylan in a more literary context than any other biographer of His Bobness. Over the course of this podcast, we discussed whether Dylan can really be considered a poet, the writers who influenced him, his Scottish connection, and his encounters with poets such as Carl Sandburg, Archibald McLeish and Allen Ginsberg. Image: Bob Dylan, Paris, France 1966 by Paul Townsend, under a Creative Commons licence.

Lorna Fleming and Anna Gray lead small groups of (mostly) women to let loose their wild side, to dive in to their unconscious and find their buried treasure. Wild Writers are creatives, public sector workers, teenagers or any other type of human who is boldly and often messily transforming on their hero's or heroine's journey. Ahead of their workshops at the SPL in April and May 2025, Kevin Williamson chats to Lorna and Anna about their wild work. Tickets for the SPL Wild Writing workshops are available here. Other Wild Writing courses can be found here.

Best Scottish Poems is the Scottish Poetry Library's annual online anthology of the 20 Best Scottish Poems, edited each year by a different editor. Bookshops and libraries – with honourable exceptions – often provide a very narrow range of poetry, and Scottish poetry in particular. Best Scottish Poems offers readers in Scotland and abroad a way of sampling the range and achievement of our poets, their languages, forms, concerns. It is in no sense a competition but a personal choice, and this year's editors, the novelists Louise Welsh and Zoë Strachan, checked and balanced each other's predilections. Their introduction demonstrates how widely they read, and how intensely. All the Best Scottish Poems selections are available on the SPL website. This special podcast features readings by established voices and emerging talent. With readings by Kathleen Jamie, Liz Lochhead, Robin Robertson, John Burnside, and many more.  Photo by Jen Hadfield.

In this podcast the poet and artist MacGillivray reads from and discusses her book, The Last Wolf of Scotland (Pighog). The collection is an exploration of connections between Scotland and the American Frontier whose form brilliantly reflects the subject matter of the poems. MacGillivray joins Jennifer Williams in a conversation that maps the rich web of influences from which her poetry emerges, taking in Doors front-man Jim Morrison, mock ancient Scottish bard Ossian, and the mysterious ‘Man with Fourteen Lives'. Plus a debate about whether poetry works better on the page or read aloud, or memorised and recited.

In this 2013 podcast, Jennifer Williams talks to poet, playwright and recording artist Kate Tempest* about hip hop, poetry, their play Brand New Ancients, mythology, world peace and much more. Kate has written plays for Paines Plough and the Battersea Arts Centre, written poetry for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Channel 4 and the BBC, worked in schools and won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2012, for Brand New Ancients.  *In 2020 the musician and poet formerly named Kate Tempest changed their name to Kae Tempest, and announced they are non-binary. In the announcement on Instagram, Tempest said they were changing the pronouns they use, from she and her to they and them. Image © Melanie Flash

Jenny Lindsay was co-creator of the popular ‘poetry cabaret' Rally and Broad (which ran from 2012-2016), a hit originally in Edinburgh that spread its wings to Glasgow. In this 2014 podcast, we talked to Jenny about her poetry and the lively spoken word scene in Scotland. Photo by Alex Aitchison.

The famous Welsh poet RS Thomas is the subject of this month's Nothing But The Poem podcast. Anne Stevenson of the Listener describes Thomas as a religious poet who 'sees tragedy, not pathos, in the human condition' ... 'He is one of the rare poets writing today who never asks for pity.' 'Like the Welsh countryside he writes about, Thomas's poetry is often harsh and austere, written in plain, somber language, with a meditative quality.' - The Poetry Foundation  Our resident podcast host Sam Tongue took an immersive dive into two RS Thomas poems: From The Farm  and Reservoirs. Find out what Sam - and the Friends Of The SPL group - took from these poems in this Nothing But The Poem podcast.

Poet Chrys Salt talks about who has the right to write about certain subjects, about writing war poetry when you have a son who is a soldier, and how poetry can benefit from a good performance. Thanks to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast.

Brian Johnstone (1950 - 2021) was a poet and former director of the StAnza poetry festival. In this archive podcast he discusses the highlights of his StAnza career, what he thinks makes a good poetry festival, his own work and his creative improvisations as part of jazz-poetry combo Trio Verso. Featuring the tracks ‘Storm Chaser' and ‘The Sound of Breaking Glass'. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean.

Alexander Hutchison (1942-2015) was a poet and translator in Scots and English. His first book Deep-Tap Tree (University of Massachusetts Press, 1978) is still in print. Other collections include The Moon Calf (Galliard, 1990) and Carbon Atom (Link-Light, 2006). Melodic Cells, an interview with Hutchison conducted by Andrew Duncan appears in Don't Start Me Talking: Interviews with Contemporary Poets (Salt: Cambridge, 2006). Salt also published Scales Dog: New and Selected Poems in 2007. In this podcast former SPL Programme Manager Jennifer Williams talks to Alexander about his then most recent collection, Bones & Breath (Salt), tardigrades, ancient spears, the poet's voice and much more!