Hamish Whyte – författare

Cats have always had a special appeal to poets - they exhibit so many human attributes, not least that characteristic Scottish trait, thrawnness. According to legend, the Scots were the first northern people to keep cats (Fergus I of Scotland is said to have brought one from Portugal in the fourth century BC), and Scots have taken cats to their hearts ever since.This anthology of over 60 poems explores the relationship between people and felines from Henryson''s 15th-century account of ''Gib Hunter, our Jolie Cat'' , through 18th century Aesopian tales, 19th-century cat-and-mouse tussles to more modern depictions of this domestic yet mysterious animal by poets such as Alastair Reid, who explore the ambivalent side of ''the tiger who eats from the hand''.Featuring the work of J.K. Annand, George Bruce, Valerie Gillies, Kathleen Jamie, Maurice Lindsay, George Macbeth, Brian McCabe, Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Tom Pow, Iain Crichton Smith, Allan Ramsay. There are also a number of traditional poems and nursery rhymes and charming line illustrations by James Hutcheson.

This is the third Selected Poems by Edwin Morgan from Carcanet, but the first since 2000 and the first to cover the full range of his poetry from his first collection in 1952 to his last in 2010, the year of his death at the age of ninety. All his different voices speak here - animals, inanimate objects, dramatic monologues by people, (famous people, unknown people and imaginary people) - in a multitude of forms and styles - sonnets, science fiction, concrete, sound, his own invented stanzas - together with his evocations of place, especially his home city of Glasgow, and a wide selection of his deservedly famous love poems. They all illustrate his incurable curiosity and a kind of relentless optimism for humanity.

This volume brings together a number of hard-to-find reviews, essays, memoirs and journal pieces by Gael Turnbull, a central figure in the interaction between American and British poetry in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and also publisher of the excellent small press, Migrant. Shearsman published his Collected Poems, 'There are words...' in 2006, and this companion volume fills out the picture of an influential figure in British letters, with a number of pieces on poets such as Basil Bunting and Roy Fisher, as well as nods in the direction of Olson and Creeley on the other side of the Atlantic. The book is introduced by the poet's widow, Jill Turnbull, who has also made the final selection of pieces to be included, with Hamish Whyte, Turnbull's long-time publisher in Edinburgh.