Albyn: Shorter Books and Monographs

MacDiarmid 2000; the Collected Works from Carcanet

by Hugh MacDiarmid, Alan Riach (Editor)

Substantial pieces on Scottish themes are assembled in this volume, from Albyn (1927) to A Political Speech delivered at Glasgow University in 1972.The editor has focused on MacDiarmid's view of powerful figures in Scottish culture, notably David Hume and - of particular interest in this Burns bicentenary year - Robert Burns.MacDiarmid's consideration of Burns in the year celebrating the bicentenary of his birth (1952) has lost none of its iconoclastic force.

388 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 1997

About the author

Christopher Murray Grieve, known by his pen name, Hugh MacDiarmid, was a Scottish poet and cultural activist.

MacDiarmid was instrumental in creating a Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century. Unusually for a first generation modernist, he was a communist; unusually for a communist, he was a committed Scottish nationalist. He wrote in English and literary Scots (sometimes referred to as Lallans).