Book description
The farmer s boy from Ayrshire who went on to be the most acclaimed
of all Scottish poets, celebrated around the world, Robert Burns is a
greater and more varied artist than those that know him only through
annual Burns Suppers and choruses of his Auld Lang Syne at New Year
could imagine.
This new selection by Ian Rankin of verses and lyrics from Scotland
s national poet, the Heaven-taught ploughman , reveals a writer
capable of evoking tremendous sympathetic power from his readers and
with an easy, astonishing command of the sounds and rhythms of both
standard English and the evocative Scots tongue. It also reveals an
artist of incredible range. His Tam O Shanter , with its midnight
pursuit of witches from a grisly graveyard dance, is gripping,
fantastical and funny in equal measure, Is there for honest poverty
beautifully expresses the egalitarian spirit by which Burns became a
political hero for so many, and sentiments both romantic ( Ae Fond
Kiss ) and bawdy ( The Fornicator ) co-exist in this canny selection
of the best of the Scottish Bard.
Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, bestselling crime-writer Ian
Rankin published the first Inspector Rebus novel, Knots and
Crosses, in 1987. The Rebus books have now been translated into
thirty-one languages and are bestsellers worldwide. Rankin has been
awarded an OBE for services to literature, has won countless awards
and presented his own television series. In 2007 he was appointed
Deputy Lieutenant of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and
two sons.
Robert Burns (1759 1796) was born in Ayrshire, one of seven children
of a struggling tenant farmer. After his father s death he leased his
own farm at Mossgiel, where he began writing in earnest. His first
volume of poems, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was an
immediate success but, despite his new fame, Burns continued as a
farmer for most of his life, unable to gain financial security. He
died prematurely of rheumatic heart disease.
