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.