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Writers celebrate close literary links in online festival Virtual Crossways 2021: The Irish Scottish Cultural and Literary Festival this weekend which features Bulgarian-born writer Kapka Kassabova who now lives in the Highlands By Val Sweeney Published: 19:30, 12 February 2021
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Writer Kapka Kassabova.
A Bulgarian-born writer living in the Highlands is to take part in an online festival bringing together some of the most-acclaimed poets and writers in Ireland and Scotland.
Award-winning Kapka Kassabova, who lives at Kilmorack, is taking part in Virtual Crossways 2021: The Irish Scottish Cultural and Literary Festival this weekend.
Burns night has been and gone, but poetry is for every night, and day. It’s a source of solace, comfort and cheer in difficult times like this current pandemic and lockdown So here, to help you through, are twenty of Scotland’s greatest poets, who aren’t Robert Burns.
William Dunbar (circa 1459-1530) “Back to Dunbar!” was a favourite phrase of Hugh MacDiarmid, and the man he was talking about was a Middle Scots poet attached to the court of James IV, who wrote works that were rhetorical and lyrical marvels. Dunbar was one of a group of medieval Scots known as the “makars” and for him the writing of poetry was making . He created poems for his patron, such as The Thrissil and the Rois, a celebration of James IV s marriage to Margaret Tudor. But Dunbar was about more than creating snapshots of court. He created poems that have resonance now. Lament for the Makaris, with its frequent refrain, timor mortis conturbat me (fear of death troubles me), still has an extrao
The quiet collapse of Scottish unionism How the distinctive creed of “standing up for Scotland” within the UK has been replaced by one-size Britishness.
By Scott Hames BBC Scotland is currently airing
The Years That Made Modern Scotland, a documentary series tracing the nation’s quiet transformation over the past five decades. Guided by Kirsty Wark, a jaunt through the archive shows us the advance of the SNP, the pain of factory closures and the rise of Scottish crime fiction, as the nation walked the road to devolution. The distance travelled is remarkable, but in tracing the rise of national identity and political confidence, an untold story lingers at the margin: the collapse of Scottish unionism as an outlook and a sensibility.
To express the grief and dislocation of our times, only poems will do
Kathleen Jamie. ‘Perhaps it is only through poetry, dealing as it does in language compressed, transformed and transfigured, that sense will ever be made of the Covid-19 pandemic.’ Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian
Kathleen Jamie. ‘Perhaps it is only through poetry, dealing as it does in language compressed, transformed and transfigured, that sense will ever be made of the Covid-19 pandemic.’ Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian
Fri 29 Jan 2021 13.25 EST
Last modified on Mon 1 Feb 2021 07.35 EST
The great Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie published a new poem on Twitter this week, prefaced by the briefest and most heartfelt of introductions: “After a weepy morning missing folks and thinking This Will Never End, I made myself go out. Wrote a rebalancing poem. Feel better now. Hope we all will soon.” The poem begins: “Trudging again / to Lone Tree Look-out / high on the grasslands / of Sparrow Cr