Ayont the Thistle

edited by Jim Mackintosh, edited by Alan Riach, edited by James Robertson

Published in 1926 in an edition of just 500 copies, Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle was a bold modernist experiment: a book-length poem addressing the human condition, written entirely in Scots. Although not reissued for nearly three decades, it has since acquired the status of a key text of Scottish literature.

This anthology marks the centenary of what is often claimed as MacDiarmid’s masterpiece. Through essays, poems, reflections and other creative responses, more than 70 writers from around the world explore the poem’s language, structure and imagery, its power and its provocations.

What is the place of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle in the twenty-first century? Who reads it, and does it still cause strong reactions?

By turns admiring, sceptical, and sharply critical, these diverse contributions reveal a work that remains startlingly alive a hundred years after its first appearance.