Fivefathers: Interviews with late Twentieth-Century Scottish Poets

Five interview-based essays celebrating Sorley

MacLean, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay

Brown, Norman MacCaig and Edwin Morgan.

Fivefathers offers a reassessment of Scottish writers

who produced significant work during or shortly after

the Second World War, on their way to earning

international reputations. Combining material from

interviews with readings of the poetry, Colin

Nicholson argues that conventional assumptions

about transitions from literary Modernism into the

contemporary do not adequately account for the

work he discusses. These writers were declaring,

occupying and developing an imaginative

independence for territory that was denied political

autonomy. Fivefathers suggests that by the second

half of the twentieth century a poetics of autonomy

was already celebrating Scottish particularities, and

making global connections of its own.