In “Scotland 1941” the Orkney-born poet Edwin Muir surveys the pageant of Scottish history. It is not, it must be said, a flattering portrait. “We were a tribe, a family, a people,” he begins, but some fatal decline has set in: under the gaze of “Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation,” Scotland has endured a “spiritual defeat wrapped warm in riches,” an event traceable to the sixteenth-century theologian John Knox and the Reformation. (“Out of that desolation we were born.”) It is a story Muir had already rehearsed in Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (1936). There Muir passes severe judgment on the central place in Scottish culture of the author of Waverley. For all Walter Scott’s greatness, Muir feels compelled to “account for a very curious emptiness which I felt behind the wealth of his imagination.” “Oh well,” the speaker of a Philip Larkin poem says of a disappointing childhood, “I suppose it’s not the place’s fault.” Muir exhibits no such reticence: Scott’s homeland was “neither a nation nor a province, and had, instead of a centre, a blank.” Tales of the Covenanters and Bonnie Prince Charlie are less chronicles of glory than so many “tawdry” fables.

Bearing a heavy share of the blame is the matter of language. The Geneva Bible, which Knox helped to prepare, was in English rather than Lowland Scots, and the resulting imposture fatally separated the nation’s heart from its head. Attempts to revive Scots as a literary language, such as those pursued by Muir’s contemporary Hugh MacDiarmid, left him cold. As he wrote in Scott and Scotland, “Dialect is to a homogeneous language what the babbling of children is to the speech of grown men and women.” His argument is a version of T.S. Eliot’s “dissociation of sensibility,” and as such not unlike Eliot’s own pronouncements in his 1919 essay “Was There a Scottish Literature?” Renaissance makars Robert Henryson and William Dunbar were exemplary, honing a style of classical elegance and precision, but Robert Burns’s Scots is a reduced thing—a vehicle for sentiment and barroom bonhomie, giving way to English whenever any abstract concept is at issue.

Muir’s origins in Orkney were a strong factor in his disaffection with Scottish revivalist rhetoric. MacDiarmid was quick to seize on this in denouncing his former friend as “not a Scot but an Orcadian,” despite MacDiarmid’s having argued in The Islands of Scotland (1939) that an overarching Scottishness united the cultures of the North Atlantic archipelago, from Shetland and Orkney to the Hebrides. Muir’s polemic in Scott and Scotland, however, is easy to deconstruct. Whatever the language, solving the riddles of history and translation should not be a primaryresponsibility of the Scottish poet writing a short lyric about a wildflower or the Loch Ness Monster. Even as he resists Scottish exceptionalism, Muir is at risk of compounding it into a performance of self-enamored impossibility.

Half a century after Muir, Kathleen Jamie wrote her own poem of reckoning with the nation, “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead,” pitched in a comic and suburban key where Muir’s had been tragic and grandiose. At a landfill site the poet finds a bag full of postcards sent from small Scottish towns in the 1960s, a bicycle repair kit, and the dead man’s joinery tools, stamped “Scotland, Scotland.” Feeling a duty toward her finds, Jamie considers taking them in, only to have a proleptic vision of someone entering her house and “perform[ing] for us this perfunctory rite:/the sweeping up, the turning out.” Better to accept the modesty of our monuments and let them go.

In another early poem, “Arraheids,” the past returns when the arrowheads in Scottish museums are revealed to be the tongues of long-dead grannies, still blethering away to themselves. No sooner have we admired Jamie’s restorative vision than the poem springs a closing surprise: these flinty ancestors are full of the same self-righteousness the poet has spent her whole life enduring from disapproving elders:

Wheesht…an you’ll hear them,
fur they cannae keep fae muttering
ye arnae here tae wonder,
whae dae ye think ye ur?

The answer to this probing question arrives in the poem that gives her 1994 collection, The Queen of Sheba, its title: heckled at a school concert with the same put-down (this time spelled “whae do you think y’ur?”),

a thousand laughing girls and she
draw our hot breath
and shout:

THE QUEEN OF SHEBA!

Jamie’s exploration in her first four collections of urban working-class female experience and of travel in the Far East filled in not a few of the blanks Muir had found on the Scottish poetry map. Few mid-century women joined Hugh MacDiarmid’s circle in Edinburgh’s Abbotsford Bar, whose ambience was well captured by the painter Alexander Moffat’s group portrait Poets’ Pub, with its uneasy female presences hovering around the edges of the boozy bards. Jamie’s emergence coincided with that of the fellow Scots Robert Crawford, W.N. Herbert, Don Paterson, John Burnside, and Carol Ann Duffy, all heavily promoted by the Poetry Society in 1994 as a “New Generation,” and benefiting from a new openness to writing from beyond the London-Oxbridge triangle.

As early as Jizzen (1999), however, Jamie’s work began to reorient itself. “Jizzen” is a Scots word for childbed, and the experience of parenthood attuned Jamie to the natural world in new and eye-opening ways. In “The Tay Moses” the poet imagines pursuing a baby as he drifts away on a river; she emerges from her car exclaiming, “LEAVE HIM! please,/it’s okay, he’s mine.” Jamie had begun a journey into the natural world in poems that became her Tree House (2004), The Overhaul (2012), and The Bonniest Companie (2015). At the same time she was producing a parallel trilogy of essay collections, Findings (2005), Sightlines (2012), and Surfacing (2019), mapping a distinctive North Atlantic biosphere extending beyond Scotland to the melting Alaskan tundra and whale skeletons in Norway.

“Glamourie” is a Scots word for magic; Jamie writes as naturally in Scots as in English, and the doubling produces complex and rewarding effects. Jamie’s books typically mix English and Scots, though in The Keelie Hawk (2024) all poems are in Scots followed by English translation. When Seamus Heaney drops Ulster Scots words into a poem—“plashy,” “thrawn,” “thole”—he offers the unprepared reader a small moment of disorientation. Entire poems in Scots, without a glossary, are another matter. One solution would be to start from English-language translations of the Hölderlin poems Jamie has rendered into Scots and triangulate until her texts begin to make sense:

Gie me, ye po’ers, jist ane summer mair
an ane maumie autumn,
that ma hairt, ripe wi sweet sang,
’s no sae swier for tae dee.

(Grant me, you powers, just one more summer,/that my heart, ripe with sweet song,/be not so reluctant to die.) These translations remind us that minority languages look outward as well as in.

The multiple perspectives thrown up by such experiments are also implicit in Jamie’s view of her Scottish landscapes. Reviewing Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (2007), she is bemused by his announcement that “to reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history”—a startling claim to make of the endlessly contested Scottish Highlands. The visitor’s greedy gaze, projecting meaning onto the landscape or stripping it away to meet a preconceived need, is an inescapable part of the larger cultural picture. In her essay “A Lone Enraptured Male,” Jamie writes:

There’s nothing wild in this country. Every square inch of it is “owned,” much has seen centuries of bitter dispute; the whole landscape is man-made, deforested, drained, burned for grouse moor, long cleared of its peasants or abandoned by them.^*

In Sightlines Jamie travels to the famously remote and depopulated islands of St. Kilda and finds not emptiness but swarms of ecotourists—a kind of Disneyland of the Celtic sublime. These meditations on cultural geography often have a hard ecological and political edge. The poet came of age politically in the Thatcher era and lent her voice to the campaign for a yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. Its defeat by a margin of nearly 11 percent may be one factor in the mood of recalibration we find in Cairn, her first book of poems in almost a decade.

Cairn is also a book about aging. “Private and Confidential” is an elegy for the poet’s parents, her father reaching for his “saggy jacket” and her mother for her “depthless bag” as they are summoned down a corridor, “grow smaller in our sight and don’t turn back.” In “Hillside Spring,” walking to the spring that feeds her local reservoir in Fife, Jamie feels “like a five years bairn again, blythly venturing toward the edge of the known, but with no-one left alive to call me home.” The first of these texts is a poem in stanzas, the second a prose poem. Cairn also features mini-essays and drawings by Miek Zwamborn, the stream of her poetry and essay collections coming together at last.

Climate change and habitat loss form a rumbling bass to much of the writing. Avian flu wreaks havoc on the seabird population, leaving grisly scenes of gannets “lying dead on their nests” on the Bass Rock, visible from Edinburgh and once used to imprison the radical Presbyterians of Muir’s “Scotland 1941.” A curlew’s skull sent to Jamie by a friend prompts a spasm of lament, as she pores over a map imagining the otter tracks that crisscross the landscape but also the traces of locals evicted during the Highland Clearances. The curlew, meanwhile, “could write its own epitaph” with its elegant long beak, “the sobbing trill gliding into silence and bone.” Technology and environmental anxiety shadow each other nervously: Jamie progresses from tracking the movement of ships on an app to studying the locations of minke whales via an online project. One whale travels from the Isle of Lewis to Guadeloupe but remains there for only two hours before swimming north again. Why? The “jagged fizz of coloured lines” on the project’s website offers no clues, and the oil ships crouch ominously on the horizon as the poet takes her daily walk.

Margaret Thatcher turns up in the essay “The Handover” when a friend courts heresy by suggesting that the Iron Lady would have taken climate change seriously, unlike the craven denialists of today’s Conservative Party. Jamie’s adult son tells her the UK is “better in than out” of NATO in the current political climate. It’s a far cry from Jamie’s radical youth, when a friend lobbed an egg at a cinema screen during an antiporn protest; now “he’d be a pensioner, and no revolution yet.” Hence perhaps the valedictory note that Cairn so often strikes. A mirror falls off a wall, and the bare patch “blanks” the poet, leaving her bereft, “though I’m not sure who has died.” Jamie is tormented by small and big problems at once—a mother dragging a child in a buggy through a hole in a wire fence, and the wider world awaiting our children “pedalling away into their own lives.” Transience is all: a flight of geese over the poet’s head is a “small-town upperworld of lost souls,” from whose realm a portion appears to have broken off when she finds a piece of glass in a field, “like a fragment of sky that had been shot down.” Cairn itself is a luminous fragment, communing powerfully with lost unities beyond our ken.

Peter Davidson rises to the challenge of Muir’s poem very differently from Jamie, inserting himself in a Scottish counterreformation of the mind and showing no inclination to budge. It is a daring gambit. Few poets since Geoffrey Hill would think of titling a poem “Per Grazia Ricevuta to our Lady of Aberdeen” or of addressing that personage in such exalted terms:

For you are flame and lantern, tears and air,
Infinite forbearance on the homeward road;
For you are sea foam and August snow,
And Mother of the morning star.

To read Davidson’s work is to enter a world of opulent European humanism and classical learning, dispossessed Jacobite gentry, and the thin northern light of Raeburn portraits hung in a castle library. Like Jamie, Davidson is an accomplished essayist. Distance and Memory (2013) is a superb evocation of the Scottish northeast and its Scandinavian periphery, a region far removed, culturally no less than geographically, from the Glasgow–Edinburgh central belt. As Davidson tells it, the northeast is a secretive place, a reservoir of counterhistories and anomalous survivals. Paeans to Cosmo Alexander’s portraiture and performances of Corelli in manor houses will strike some as recherché points of entry into Scottish history, but the obscurity is the point and signals the effort required to haul ourselves out of the Scotch broth of simulacra in which the past is more usually served up. (Call it the Braveheart syndrome.)

If Scotland’s national animal can be the unicorn, there is no reason why Latin—Davidson also writes in that language—cannot be a living tongue for a Scottish poet. In “Mr Dowland’s Midnight” lute music strikes a Catullian note, “bearing discourse/(Vivamus mea Lesbia) into night,” while in “The True Vine” the Latin motto virescit vulnere virtus (virtue grows from a wound) transports us to Renaissance Spain and England. Though redoubtable, Davidson’s classical visions are not unprecedented: in Apollos of the North (2006), the poet Robert Crawford stakes a claim for the living legacy of the poets George Buchanan’s and Arthur Johnston’s Renaissance Latin verse, a beautiful last gasp of Caledonian urbanity before the long concussion of the Acts of Union in 1707. The cultural monuments of the past are exhibits in what another Davidson poem calls “the Museum of Loss,” but as he writes in that poem, “WHAT IS TO BE FEARED ABOUT OBJECTS IS LESS THEIR SILENCE THAN THEIR ELOQUENCE.”

That eloquence takes many surprising forms. Davidson is strongly drawn to the style he celebrates in his esoteric study The Universal Baroque (2007), in which he writes that “the nation state is the enemy of the Baroque.” He chides Herbert Grierson, the Shetland-born editor of John Donne and a major influence on T.S. Eliot, for the“extraordinary contortions” involved in separating “metaphysical” poetry from its baroque European hinterland in the name of an exceptionalist British tradition (and for almost completely excluding Scottish writing from that genre). Where the nation-state instills a unitary narrative in a tradition like that of the metaphysical poets, the baroque prefers a fractally subdividing reality. For Davidson as for Walter Benjamin, the baroque falls short of the values of the classical world and turns instead to a world of ruined objects and ubiquitous melancholy.

ArcticElegies, Davidson’s second collection, ranges widely over its ruined terrain, from the northern latitudes of Sir John Franklin’s expeditions to Scotland, and then “empty late-summer London,” where the poet pushes through “static” and “white noise” in search of a place “distilled by relentless love.” In “The Mourning Virtuoso” Davidson writes an elegy for an unnamed and unknowable friend (“Your lovers knew you least, your friends hardly at all”) who has spent their life between cultures and “histories of exile,” “rumours and disappearances,” and “secret assignations with antiquity.”

The word “secret” recurs a lot, and never without a certain theatrical quality. “Secret Theatres of Scotland,” for instance, recalls the Borges short story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.” In Borges’s tale a traitor to the cause of Irish nationalism becomes the hero of an elaborately staged drama that culminates in his assassination; by playing his part, the dead man atones for his treachery and dies serving the cause he had betrayed. In Davidson’s poem the Scottish traveler is surrounded by eerie occurrences that seem clearly to be forms of immersive theatrical experience: “A sacred drama is acted for you alone, by masked and golden-robed players speaking only in Latin. They enact renunciations of the world and, in the end, a martyrdom.” The players then remove their masks and kiss the viewer’s hand. The text pans back to one of Davidson’s all-knowing landscapes: “The hills and the north about you, and time uncertain.” Could those hills know something we don’t about where theater ends and reality begins? Almost certainly.

Against any suggestion that Davidson has sketched a historical theme park (more tawdry legends), there is the ending of “Jacobite Song”: “Snow, falcon, blackbird, water, rose and tower:/Faded, flown, taken, frozen, fallen, gone.” These are visions of a lost and broken kingdom, but the poem rejects nostalgia for something closer to what Hegel would call “determinate negation,” a negation turned back ultimately on itself. The knowledge of historical fallenness stretches the visionary lens finer and finer until it shatters, propelling the poems into their own afterlife.

If Davidson’s and Jamie’s work converges, it is less in the here and now of the Scottish scene than in some more evanescent zone of possibility. For Muir, Romantic Scotland was a “sham nation” whose “spiritual defeat” nevertheless came “wrapped warm in riches.” Somewhere between the flux and reflux of disillusionment and radical opportunity, Jamie’s and Davidson’s work takes its chance. A loch in Fife, despoiled by illegal garbage dumping and diesel pollution, the memory of a “magic high blue sky” above factories and a steelworks out a school window (Jamie); “words diamond-scratched on a window pane three centuries ago,” and a Scottish painter in Venice brightening her muted palette with a shock of Quattrocento red (Davidson)—such are the moments of vision we are granted by these two poets, and with them a sense of the “scrape of radiance through the dark of things.”