Be the First to Like This

Be the First to Like This: New Scottish Poetry

A new anthology, Be the First to Like This, is being published by Vagabond Voices on 22 September. It marks the arrival of a new generation of Scottish poets.

Subjects are as diverse as texting, fancying film stars, dole offices, quantum physics, and Richard Branson; the common denominator is modernity, a sense these are poems that could only have been written in the early twenty-first century.

Order Be the First to Like This

Listen to BTFTLT editor Colin Waters and poets Theresa Munoz and Jenny Lindsay discuss the Be the First to Like This anthology on Radio Scotland's Culture Studio in September 2014.

Click on 'The Poets' in the menu above to be taken to poems by, as well as recordings and videos featuring, the poets of BTFTLT.

"I'm always being asked how poetry is faring in the digital age. It seems to me that it is flourishing. Be the First to Like This proves this on every page."
Liz Lochhead, Scotland's National Poet

Image: Norman McBeath

"Whether it's Claire Askew's sky 'like a cooling flashbulb' or Miriam Gamble's 'sky sucking back its thunder-claps' or Niall Campbell's 'waiter poet' who is 'bringer of the feast and the bill' or William Letford's 'fingle foogle boogaloo', there's something here for everyone to relish. This anthology presents new Anglophone Scottish poetry as a broad, sometimes turbulent stream. Anyone prepared to wade in and pan for gold is likely to come back enriched."
Robert Crawford
Image: Clare Maynard