The Chagall Winnockswi ither Scots poems and ballants o Europe

From the forests of Finland to the plain of Lombardy, from a Scottish beach to a river island in Hungary,Tom Hubbard deploys the riches of the Scots language to explore that tragicomic space we call Europe. The poems are variously tender and mischievous in their treatment of our all-too-human foibles …


Hubbard believes that an international outlook and a parochial one (centred, in his case, on his native Fife) can be mutually enriching. The poems in THE CHAGALL WINNOCKS draw on the folklore of many European countries, not least that of Scotland - and indeed it is a retelling of a Fife legend, which opens this collection of poems, which have grown out of his travels in, and study of, the continent as a whole.


Many of these poems tell stories, in the form of ballads or the reworking of traditional tales; conversely, this collection of poems could be seen as a series of short stories, albeit in verse form.


Hubbard's new collection is a bold statement of faith in the Scots language, and echoes Hugh MacDiarmid's remarks on 'the unique blend of the lyrical and the ludicrous' which is possible in Scots, 'its Dostoevskian debris of ideas - an inexhaustible quarry of subtle and significant sound' ('A Theory of Scots Letters').


ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Tom Hubbard is a Scottish novelist, poet and itinerant scholar who has worked in many countries. His permanent home is in his native Fife. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Budapest (ELTE), Connecticut (where he was Lynn Wood Neag Distinguished Visiting Professor of Scottish Literature in 2011) and Grenoble (as Professeur invité), and a Writer in Residence at the Château de Lavigny in Switzerland.


His short book The Integrative Vision: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Baudelaire, Rilke and MacDiarmid (1997) was based on lectures to students of design at Glasgow School of Art. He was the first Librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library, from 1984 to 1992. His first novel Marie B. (Ravenscraig Press, 2008), based on the life of the Ukrainianborn painter Marie Bashkirtseff, was longlisted for a Saltire Society book award. His recent book-length poetry collections are The Chagall Winnocks (2011) and Parapets and Labyrinths (2013), both from Grace Note Publications, as well as a pamphlet collection, The Nyaff (2012), from Windfall Books of Kelty, Fife. An essay on the Scottish poet Harvey Holton (1949-2010) was published as a pamphlet by Fras Publications as Harvey Holton: Bard, Makar, Shaman (2013). He has edited a volume of essays, The Poetry of Baudelaire, which will appear from the New York publisher Grey House in 2014. He has also recently made English and Scots versions of poems by the nineteenthcentury Russian poet Lermontov for a anthology After Lermontov, edited by Peter France and Robyn Marsack (Carcanet 2014). He is on the editorial board of the journal Scottish Affairs, and an honorary visiting fellow at the University of Edinburgh Institute of Governance, where he is working on a “Scotland and Europe” project with Dr Eberhard Bort.


Between 2000 and 2010 he was research fellow and editor of major bibliographical projects: BOSLIT (the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation, University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland, at http://boslit.nls.uk [2000-2005]), and BILC (the Bibliography of Irish Literary Criticism, National University of Ireland Maynooth, at http://bilc.nuim.ie [2006-2010]).