Thurs 25th May, 7pm : Sanquhar Bookshop
Fri 26 May, 7pm : Poosie Nansies, 21 Loudon Street, Mauchline
27 May, 2pm : The Bookshop, Wigtown
30 May, 6pm : Ottakars, Glasgow
31 May, 6pm : Poetry in the Parliament, Edinburgh
9 June, 7.30 pm: Leith Festival, The Lighthouse pub on the shore
24 July, 7.30pm : Crail Arts Fest, Crail Town Hall
Our traditional language could hardly have a more eloquent exponent.
LESLEY DUNCAN, THE HERALD
Sanquhar poet Rab Wilson's new collection, Accent o the Mind, is published by Edinburgh's Luath Press.
Hear Rab read the title poem and other work in Scots on the Scottish Writers' Podcast, recorded at the BBC Scotland studios in Dumfries. More on Rab Wilson's work...
After calls for the Scottish Executive to take action to ensure Scots is recognised as a language, Accent o the Mind is a timely and contemporary collection, chiefly in the Scots tongue.
Rab Wilson covers the variety of modern Scottish life through refreshingly honest and often humorous poetry, encompassing history, text messaging, politics, asylum-seeking hedgehogs and connoisseurs of Buckfast...
His set of 15 interlinked sonnets, Cormilligan, about a late example of the Clearances in the south-west, has rightly been seen as a tour de force, combining, as it does, acute humanity and sense of landscape with technical virtuosity. Somewhaur in the Daurk, his series of sonnets inspired by the Miners’ Strike of 1984-1985, gives the participants and their womenfolk a voice and a dignity that demand sympathy, regardless of political viewpoints.
The poems he wrote as Wigtown Bard range from the historical to the satirical and enlivened Wigtown’s literary festival in 2004. Individual poems, whether set in the local supermarket or the former mining towns of his youth, have humour, pathos, sometimes indignation, and always a warm immediacy.
Rab Wilson is a free spirit who speaks and writes in Scots (in everyday letters and emails as well as poetry) with complete ease and unselfconsciousness. This inspirational new collection consolidates Rab Wilson’s position as one of Scotland’s leading poets and plays a part in the reinvigoration of the Scots language in modern Scottish society.
