The Best Laid Schemes: Selected Poetry and Prose

Two hundred years after his death, some of Burns's words are even more famous than he is: the words to “Auld Lang Syne,” for example, and the wish “to see oursels as others see us.” Yet the national poet of Scotland had more in him than the international anthology pieces—including radical politics, storytelling, interesting prose, and verse, in Scots and in standard English. This big book makes a case for Burns as a major romantic poet, whose invitations and angers, stanzas and choruses, merit long appreciation now. Some of the prose bears only historical interest, but many lesser-known poems now shine bright—with anger, sarcasm, self-mockery, double entendres: “I like the lasses—Gude forgie me!/ For monie a Plack [coin] they wheedle frae me,/ At dance or fair;/ Maybe some ither thing they gie me/ They weel can spare.” Few poets have more gracefully or comically asked the ladies to give up their honor. Coming in time for the poet's 250th birthday, the collection should surely let poets, and reviewers, try to give this complex, hardworking and musically gifted figure his due. (July)