ST ANDREW’S Day was our prompt. The annual McCash Scots Poetry Competition, run jointly by Alan Riach from the University of Glasgow and Lesley Duncan, poetry editor of The National’s newspaper cousin The Herald and which celebrates Scots in all its forms and aims to support it, is now open for entries.
It’s a decade since in 2012 we published The Smeddum Test: 21st-Century Poems in Scots (Kennedy & Boyd), an anthology of some of the finest contemporary poetry written in Scots between 2003 and 2012. The 101 poems were selected from outstanding entries to the James McCash Scots Poetry Competition, an annual event in the nation’s literary calendar. The title (taken from one of the poems) employs that good Scots word smeddum, meaning strength of character, spirit, energy, grit, vigorous common sense, and resourcefulness.
It’ll be familiar to many readers from Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s wonderful short story “Smeddum” in which the central character, Mistress Meg Menzies of Tocherty Toun, trumps the petty bourgeois aspirations and hypocritical pretentiousness of most of her own children by supporting the only daughter she has who possesses the quality: “She’s fit to be free and to make her own choice the same as myself and the same kind of choice.
