Best Laid Schemes, The

From a Scottish as well as an international perspective it is time for a new and wide-ranging selection of Burns’s verse aimed both at general readers and Burns aficionados. Newly edited from early printed texts and from manuscripts, The Best Laid Schemes is the only substantial selection of Burns’s work in print which has line-by-line glossing of the Scots words. Burns himself added a concluding general glossary to his book, but many modern readers will prefer simply to run their eye along the line for a gloss, rather than having to ferret around at the back of the volume. As well as containing outstanding examples of Burns’s prose, this selection also includes some rediscovered verse, printed from manuscript and available in no other editions. The background to this ‘new’ work is set out in a separate section. Here are Burns’s best-loved poems along with a full selection of the work which shows his sheer mastery of form, his political interests, his enthusiasms and loves. Seamus Heaney has written in praise of Burns’s ‘art speech’. This book aims to help readers attend sympathetically to a masterfully constructed, remarkable, and freshly accessible poetic voice.

Acclaimed Burns scholar Robert Crawford and his colleague from the School of English at St Andrews, Christopher MacLachlan.