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  • Why we do it: editing a little magazine
          "Unlike bombs, guns, and other signs of the end of discussion, they are perfectly useless."


  • The Dark Horse: interview with Nikki Milholin
          "Success in terms of a little poetry magazine is in: a) surviving; b) retaining literary quality; and c) creating some kind of a ripple in poetic sensibility."


  • Ian Hamilton in conversation
          "I thought on the basis of his texts that Salinger was a sort of gameplayer, and that I'd lure him out by sheer force of playfulness ... a massive miscalculation. He came out surrounded by lawyers."
    Read responses to this interview.


  • Ian Hamilton obituary
          My brief overview of his life and career, from The Herald, New Year's Day, 2002.


  • A note on Wendy Cope
          "As with Hardy's, her best work convinces less by its dazzling ideas than by its emotional resonance."


  • Hugh McMillan: Aphrodite's Anorak
          "In part, the Scottish poetry scene, like any other, is a mix of backscratching and indifference to genuine talents who remain apart from the ruckus."


  • MacCaig / O'Rourke / Ferguson reviews
          "MacCaig wrote excellent rhyming verse, such as this volume's 'Return to Scalpay', but other examples here suffer from his earlier penchant for vapid philosophising."


  • A MacDiarmid borrowing
          Unpublished letter for the TLS.


  • On Kirkpatrick Dobie
          An obituary of this remarkable Dumfries poet, who died in 1999.


  • Interview with Julia Park
          Quirky and iconoclastic interview on Scottish and American poetry with the feisty Julia Park, for her Californian journal Redhills Review.