Accent O the Mind

His set of 15 interlinked sonnets, Cormilligan, about a late example of the Clearances in the south-west, has rightly been seen as a tour de force, combining, as it does, acute humanity and sense of landscape with technical virtuosity. 'Somewhaur in the Daurk', his series of sonnets inspired by the Miners' Strike of 1984-1985, gives the participants and their womenfolk a voice and a dignity that demand sympathy, regardless of political viewpoints. The poems he wrote as Wigtown Bard range from the historical to the satirical and enlivened Wigtown's literary festival in 2004. Individual poems, whether set in the local supermarket or the former mining towns of his youth, have humour, pathos, sometimes indignation, and always a warm immediacy. From Somerfield supermarket to Morris Dancing, text messaging and Buckfast to giving a voice to miners, Rab Wilson encompasses the variety of modern Scottish life through refreshingly honest, often humorous poetry.

Rab Wilson Rab Wilson was born in New Cumnock, Aryrshire, in 1960 and worked in the Ayrshire pits until the Miners' Strike of 1984. He then left the mining industry to train as a psychiatric nurse in 1986. A Scots poet, Rab writes predominantly in Lallans, and his poetry has appeared in some of Scotland's leading poetry magazines, and regularly in The Herald newspaper's daily poetry column. He has performed his work to varied audiences throughout Scotland and has appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, the Robert Burns International Festival, and was recently Festival Bard at the Wigtown Book Festival. Rab has twice been a prize winner of the McCash Poetry Prize, is currently a member of the Scots Language Society's National Committee and the Robert Burns Writing Fellow for Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association. He lives in New Cumnock.