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"Sonnets from Scotland ranges over a rich variety of the strange, the unfamiliar, the forgotten and the yet-to-happen in the Scottish experience. Included are the prehistoric Bearsden shark, Matthew Paris's map, Poe at the Broomielaw, Matt McGinn, the Solway Canal, and a vision of a future Glasgow, Clydegrad."

From the cover blurb

The book contains 51 sonnets, and on the back cover a 52nd entitled 'Hors Série (for H.W.)'. ('H.W.' is Hamish Whyte, the book's publisher.) Its epigraph is a line from Brecht's play The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in the original German: "O Wechsel der Zeiten! Du Hoffnung des Volks!" ("O changing times! Hope of the people!")

The cover is by Alasdair Gray, and each image refers to a different sonnet (left to right, and top to bottom): 'Slate', 'The Coin', 'In Argyll', 'Hors Série', 'Carboniferous', 'At Stirling Castle, 1507' and 'Poe in Glasgow'.

"[Sonnets from Scotland] began with the idea of writing one or two, I think as a kind of reaction, probably, to the failure of the Referendum [in 1979] to give Scotland political devolution and any idea of a Scottish Assembly. (…) It's a kind of comeback, an attempt to show that Scotland was there, was alive and kicking (…) and that one mustn't write it off just because the Assembly had not come into being."

Nothing Not Giving Messages (Polygon, 1990), p.141

Sonnets from Scotland

1980s

Sonnets from Scotland ranges over a rich variety of the strange, the unfamiliar, the forgotten and the yet-to-happen in the Scottish experience.

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