Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915-75), a principal figure of the Scottish Renaissance, is - together with Hugh MacDiarmid - one of the founders of Scottish modern poetry.

The premature death of Sydney Goodsir Smith at the age of fifty-nine, while this volume of his 'Collected Poems' was in production, deprived the world of one of the major personalities in twentieth-century British literature. The poems included in this volume, mostly written in Scots dialect - from 'Skail Wind', first published in 1941, to the moving poems of his maturity and the gentle, philosophical poems of his later years - show us the journey of a man who understood the world only too well.

The fact that Smith's work - so admired by MacDiarmid, MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, Kurt Wittig, David Murison and other poets and scholars - has fallen comprehensively from view ... is a matter of dismay