The Scottish Poetry Library (SPL) has been a proud partner in this year’s Gies A Scots Poem Day, commissioning a stunning suite of new poems in Scots to mark a landmark anniversary.
2026 is the centenary of Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle — a foundational work for contemporary poetry in Scots, and a poem without which much of the writing in the language today might never have existed. It seemed the perfect moment for a bold creative response.
Scots poet Colin Bramwell invited some of the standard bearers of present-day Scots poetry to compose new work in response to MacDiarmid and his legacy — taking issue with him, praising him, or both. The resulting collection features new poems by Colin Bramwell, Charles Lang, Michael Mullen, Gerda Stevenson, Michael Grieve, Robert Crawford, David Kinloch, WN Herbert, Rab Wilson and Lesley Harrison. As a visual stimulus, poets were offered Calum Colvin’s remarkable 3D portrait of MacDiarmid, created in support of the Royal Scottish Academy’s 200th anniversary.
You can read all the new poems — and watch and hear the poets reading their work — on the SPL website at scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/gies-a-scots-poem-day-2026.
About the Scottish Poetry Library
The SPL was founded in Edinburgh with a simple but powerful idea: that poetry deserves a home of its own. Dreamed into existence by founding director Tessa Ransford — herself a poet — it began modestly in some rooms off the Royal Mile with 300 donated books and two part-time staff. Today it occupies an award-winning building at Crichton’s Close in the Canongate, with a collection of around 30,000 items and a programme reaching schools, communities and readers across Scotland and beyond.
At the heart of everything the SPL does is the belief — as writer Jenni Fagan puts it — that “poetry belongs in every community.” As well as its lending and reference collections, the SPL runs creative learning programmes, live events and an extensive range of online resources. Supported by Creative Scotland and the City of Edinburgh Council, it works to remove barriers to poetry — whether those are financial, physical or simply a matter of feeling that it isn’t for you.
Gies A Scots Poem Day is a Hands Up for Trad initiative. Find out more at handsupfortrad.scot.