The Keelie Hawk, Poems in Scots by Kathleen Jamie was published in 2024. Kathleen Jamie became Scotland’s fourth Makar in 2021 until December 2024.

The Keelie Hawk (Kestrel) is a fairly slim volume, as books of poetry tend to be. The poems are written in Scots, with an English translation on the opposite page. She had planned to just publish a small pamphlet of poems but the poetry editor at Picador Colette Bryce said that she saw no reason why a major London house shouldn’t publish a whole book of poems in Scots, so as Kathleen Jamie said – I scrievit some mair.

I can’t really judge how easy or difficult these poems would be for non Scots speakers to understand, I like to think that by the time you get half-way through then a reader might have picked up the meaning of a lot of the language. I hope so anyway as the Scots is always much more lyrical.

I’m not a huge fan of ‘normal’ poetry but I enjoyed this book. Jamie is much the same age as me so many of her experiences of speaking Scots as a youngster were similar. THEY gave you a row for it, especially at school as it was seen as being slang back then, and of course it isn’t.

This book has 116 pages. All but four of the poems are by Jamie, the other four are in translation which Jamie has adapted into Scots: two by Friedrich Holderin and two by an Uyghur poet Chimengul Awut who hasn’t been seen since she was arrested in 2018 by Chinese security officials and sent to a ‘ re-education camp.’