The Poems of Robert Fergusson ed. Matthew P. McDiarmid, 3rd series 21 and 24, now reprinted in one volume (2005). This is the only complete edition of Fergusson’s poems in print. It contains all his Scottish and all his English poems, along with extensive biographical and critical materials and notes. Fergusson is a major poet in a Scots literary tradition running from Dunbar, to Burns, and on to Hugh McDiarmid. He can be both lyrical and delicate, bawdy and satirical, sometimes within the same poem. The broadly chronological arrangement of this invaluable edition enables the reader to see that even towards the end of a life that ended in personal tragedy, Fergusson remained wonderfully irreverent. As in his splendid translation of Horace’s 11th ode, which commences, ‘Ne’er fash your tumb what gods decree/To be the weird o’ you and me’, and concludes ‘The day looks gash, toot aff your horn/Nor care yae strae about the morn’.