Scottish poet crafts epic poem from ordinary Scots’ requests for devolved powers to Holyrood
My recent work in Scotland and the uplifting presentation on the Scottish Rural Parliament at the RSN conference this week lead me to look jealously to the north in terms of “rural.” I am sure the motive power of all things coming out of the country has something to do with the democratic renewal arising from last year’s referendum. Here you can read about that concept being captured in verse:
The Scottish poet Alec Finlay has spent six months reading through tens of thousands of emails and letters written by ordinary Scots to Lord Smith in the wake of last year’s independence referendum, turning them into a 64-page opus which will be published exactly a year on from the historic vote. The 49-year-old poet, who is the son of the Scottish sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay, described the Smith Commission as “the biggest vox pop in the British isles” since the use of Mass Observation during the Second World War. He said reading the anonymous submissions from people on both sides of the referendum argument gave a “true” insight into how Scots felt about their country: “Ordinary people had written what they felt, dreamed and believed. I’m really interested in registers of speech that aren’t owned by politicians. When I started looking at the submissions, they were a mixture of very dull and very inspiring – they’re people trying to address the issues of all of our lives.”