This anthology includes the works of a number of Scottish concrete poets who have not appeared in international anthologies in this field. The book also includes a section of commentaries on concrete poetry by Finlay, Gomringer, Riddell, Morgan, and Leonard. The final section of the book annotates selected poems. A compact disc in an insert in the rear dust jacket has interviews, poetry readings and sound poetry by various poets.Peter Manson's review: This exciting and compendious anthology collects an unprecedented variety of poems written by Scots from the Renaissance to the present day, though the great bulk of its contents was written in the last 40 years. Its remit is wide but definable: the poems all, in one way or another, place the emphasis on poetry as a pattern made from the various material aspects of language: language as sound, as letters carved or arranged on a page, as words or phrases to be varied or permuted. Historically, it ranges from Renaissance pattern-poems, through acrostics and found poems, to classic examples of 1960s concrete and sound poetry and hints of a cyberpoetry to come.Such work has had surprisingly high visibility in modern-day Scotland, largely due to the presence here of two major poets - Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay - whose avant-garde affiliations reach back to the international Concrete Poetry movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. As well as providing some of the most remarkable poetry in the anthology, the example of these poets (both also celebrated for work which is not visual or sound-based) has extended the range of options open to younger poets: in Scotland, visual and (certain kinds of) sound poetry are things that otherwise mainstream poets sometimes decide to do.The editors have shown great skill in arranging poems so that each casts light on another: from twin homages to the artist Kasimir Malevich by Finlay and Colin Dunning, to the mischievous placement of Morgan's sound poem The Loch Ness Monster's Song next to Hugh MacDiarmid's onomatopoeic representation of birdsong and sea-surge (MacDiarmid was famously hostile to the concrete poets of the 1960s), the editing emphasises again and again that these are poems to be read, not dry and content-free formal exempla.It all comes highly recommended, even if, in the end, the anthology is a little too neatly-produced to be wholly representative of the traditions it includes. The rising prominence of visually-aware poetry in the second half of the last century was at least partly a result of the adoption by little presses of mimeograph and cheap offset litho printing. Both these methods of reproduction placed the poet/publisher (the publishers were often poets) directly in control of the appearance of the final printed page, and encouraged the reading of the text (any text) as a fully-intended composite of words and design. This was the first step towards a poetry which granted textual (and therefore readable) status to any mark which might be made on a page, and led directly to the anarchic and improvisatory visual and sound poetry chronicled by presses such as Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum. Such shenanigans seem not to have had much influence in Scotland (there's nothing here to compare with the legendary performance where Cobbing appeared before an audience with a red cabbage and a meat cleaver, sliced the cabbage in two and read the cabbage to the audience), but a few more pages reproduced in facsimile (to place beside the beautiful typewriter poems of Alan Riddell) would have opened out the historical and international resonance of some of the work of the 1960s in particular. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.