Robert Garioch - Works

Works

Experience as a POW had a significant impact on Garioch's career, and he provides a vivid account of those years in his autobiographical Two Men and a Blanket (1975). While interned in Italy, he learnt the language sufficiently well to read also authors who wrote in a variety of native dialects.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Garioch wrote very little poetry concerning his war experiences. Instead he focussed primarily on social causes and the plight of the 'wee man', a fact that may account for his enduring popularity (particularly on the readings circuit). These facts, however, have distracted many critics from his extraordinary technical skill and the responsible scholarship of his handling of the Scots language, in which he surpasses all his contemporaries and even his great predecessor Hugh MacDiarmid (of whom he became critical). And there are weightier poems, such as 'The Wire', 'The Muir' or 'The Big Music', which entirely contradict the cosy persona which he sometimes adopted, and which is more often projected onto him. Aside from his original compositions, Garioch also translated a number of works by other poets into Scots. He translated a large number of poems from Roman dialect by Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, who was a massive influence on his own poetry, as well as two plays by George Buchanan (which were originally written in Latin). He also rendered Pindar and Hesiod into Scots.

Robert Garioch is commemorated in Makars' Court, outside The Writers' Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh.

Selections for Makars' Court are made by The Writers' Museum; The Saltire Society; The Scottish Poetry Library.