Product Details
A Night Out with Robert Burns: The Greatest Poems

A Night Out with Robert Burns: The Greatest Poems
By Robert Burns

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Product Description

The Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns has been idolized and eulogized. He has been sainted, painted, sculpted, tormented, and toasted. Best known for his poem “Auld Lang Syne,” Burns is regarded as the patron saint of the heartsore and the hungover. But beneath his cult following and the patriotic yawps, there is the writing itself, which is among the purest of any age. In A Night Out with Robert Burns novelist and Scottish essayist Andrew O’Hagan joins company with the poet who has mattered most to him throughout his own writing career. Organizing the poems into four overlapping categories, O’Hagan offers fragments and distilled commentary of his own, forming an ongoing dialogue between O’Hagan and the bard himself. The effect is explosive, giving us Robert Burns at his very best—a political Burns, a satirical Burns, a poet who can name hypocrisy and intolerance while always aiming directly at the human heart.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1175391 in Books
  • Published on: 2009-02-03
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 224 pages

Editorial Reviews

Review
"'Save this collection a place at your Burn's table.'- Guardian * 'People who find it hard to get into Robert Burns have the answer to their prayers with this book. Here are The Greatest Poems presented in a way that Burns himself would have enjoyed -- letting the poems chime and rhyme with the debates that surround us in the world today. Somebody clever once said that poetry helps you to live your life, and here is Burns at his most helpful, in conversation with a Scottish writer who loves him, Andrew O'Hagan. I think the book will change a lot of people's attitude to poetry.' - Ewan McGregor * 'The way Burns sounded, his choice of words, his rhymes and metaphors, all that collapsed the distance I expected to feel between myself and the schoolbook poetry I encountered first at Anahorish Elementary School...He did not fail the Muse or us or himself as one of poetry's chosen instruments.' - Seamus Heaney * 'O'Hagan strips away the sentimentality which continues to cling to Burn's coat-tails and offers him to us at his very best - political, passionate, incisive and expressive - with biographical and textual notes that greatly enrich the reader's experience.' - The Guardian * 'Picking out his favourite Burns poems, [O'Hagan] explains why each of them still matters, either personally or politically, with the lucidity one has come to expect from one of the leading Scottish essayists and novelists of his generation.' - The Scotsman"

Review
"Somebody clever once said that poetry helps you to live your life, and here is Burns at his most helpful, in conversation with a Scottish writer who loves him, Andrew O’Hagan. I think this book will change a lot of people’s attitude to poetry." — Ewan McGregor

"Wonderful" — Scotland on Sunday

"Exactly the sort of enterprise his 250th birthday deserves." — Glasgow Herald

About the Author
Andrew O'Hagan was born in Scotland in 1968. He is author of The Missing and Our Fathers, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Holtby Prize for Fiction. With his second novel, Personality, he won the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. His most recent novel, Be Near Me, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Andrew O'Hagan's work is published in the London Review of Books, Daily Telegraph, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker.