Hamish Henderson: Collected Poems

Description

Henderson wrote, sang, and agitated for a Scottish socialist republic, for the dissolution of the British empire and its legacies, and for a conception of human value incommensurable with exploitation under late capitalism. His formative influences were his childhood exposure to Scotland's anonymous song-poetry, and the comradely solidarity of the anti-fascist struggle of his young adulthood. Henderson's poetic voice, therefore, is at once queer, collectivist, radical, romantic, viciously satirical, and over-earnest. It reaches always for a way of reconciling the voice of the artist with those whom they presume to speak for, to, or out of - and it wrestles tirelessly with the weight of history and the immediacy of emancipatory struggle. This book pushes at - and often transgresses - the boundaries between high modernist poetics and popular folk song, between the profound and profane, between works of individual artistic endeavour and the mass of stubborn ephemera ascribed to 'anon'.

Hamish Henderson was born in 1919 in Blairgowrie in Perthshire, educated in Dulwich College and Cambridge University, and served in North Africa and Italy with the 51st Highland Division during the Second World War. Along with his poetry, Hamish was well-known as a songwriter, a translator and a pioneer in the field of Scottish folksong. He died in March 2002. Corey Gibson is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of The Voice of the People: Hamish Henderson and Scottish Cultural Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). His writing and research is focused on the radical literary imagination in Scotland.

'Both rattle-bag and monument, it celebrates the sheer variety and social zest of Henderson's songs and poems, from highly wrought lyrics to soldiering songs, to comic squibs. ...Building on the work of earlier editors, it's a landmark achievement that fully restores impish intellectualist and bawdy check - and yes, highly questionable language - to our slightly sainted image of Henderson' * The Bottle Imp (Best Scottish Books, 2019) * 'Admired by artists and politicians as diverse as Bob Dylan and Nelson Mandela, Henderson is the subject of a handsome edition of Collected Poems' * Scotsman * 'Reveals one of Scotland's best-loved poets in a completely new light' * Times *