Into a Room: Selected Poems

by William Soutar, Carl MacDougall (Editor), Douglas Gifford (Editor)

Into a Room presents an edited selection of William Soutar's poems for a wider readership. Each Scots poem is annotated and the editors, Carl MacDougall and Douglas Gifford have written a full introduction. They argue that Soutar's work is truly eclectic and traditionally inspired from Dunbar, Henryson, the Makars and the Ballads.

144 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 2000

About the author

William Soutar was a Scottish poet, born 1898. He served in the navy in World War I, and afterwards studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he encountered the work of Hugh MacDiarmid. This led to a radical alteration in his work, and he became a leading poet of the Scottish Literary Renaissance and 'one of the greatest poets Scotland has produced'. In 1924, he was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. From 1930 he was bedridden. He died of tuberculosis in 1943. His journal, Diary of a Dying Man, was published posthumously and is considered to 'put him into the rank of the great diarists'

One form of verse which he used was the cinquain (now known as American cinquain), these he labelled epigrams. He took up this form in the second half of the 1930s with such enthusiasm that he became an even more prolific practitioner than Adelaide Crapsey had been.

Reviews

[Dreichet · Rating 5 out of 5]

“And for the while he was near,
Glimmerin in the gloom,
I thocht the hale o' the world was there
Sae sma' in a sma' room.”

After discovering a monument to Soutar in Perth town centre that featured an excerpt from “Ballad”, I swiftly ordered this collection of his work and was not disappointed. A wonderful and varied selection of works in Scots (for the most part), with a spattering of English. Subjects range from fantasy and storytelling to painfully human perspectives on the lasting agony of war.

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

An accessible and enjoyable collection of poems in Scots and English.