The Scottish poet Robert Burns has been idolised and eulogised. He has been sainted, painted, tarted up and toasted. He is famous as the author of 'Auld Lang Syne', and he has long since become the patron saint of the heart-sore and the hung-over. But what about the poems? Beneath the cult of Burns' Nights and patriotic yawps, there is the work itself, among the purest and most truthful created in any age. This is a Burns collection like no other: a reader's edition, made for the pleasure of reading. Novelist and Scottish essayist Andrew O'Hagan comes into company with the poet who has mattered most to him in his writing life. He selects the poems for the reader, and converses with the work, offering fragments and distilled commentary of his own. The effect is explosive, giving us Robert Burns at his very best - a political Burns, a poet who can name hypocrisy and intolerance, and point directly to the human heart.

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.About the AuthorBorn 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.

Edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg.The Canongate Burns is the most comprehensive and challenging edition of the poems and songs of Robert Burns ever published. Drawing on extensive scholarship and the poet's own inimitable letters, this definitive edition offers a wealth of information on Burns's life and times, the hardship of his early days, his political beliefs, his hatred of injustice and his fate as a writer too often sentimentalised by biographers, critics and well-meaning enthusiasts.The poems are presented in the order of their first appearance, giving further insights into the reception of Burns's work and the guarded relationship he had both with his readers and his own fame. We see Burns as a radical figure in a British as well as a Scottish context, the peer of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Byron in the revolutionary and repressive world of the 1790s.With its inclusion of recently attributed poems, explanatory notes and extensive Scots...

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...