Rab's poems go on display

Published 12 Jan 2010 17:06 0 Comments

Robert Burns Writing Fellow for Dumfries & Galloway Arts Association, Rab Wilson, will see his poems go on display in the Midsteeple, Dumfries, in an exhibition entitled Creative Burns Poetry. The exhibition will run from Thursday 21 January until Saturday 13 February.

New Cumnock born Rab was commissioned early in Homecoming Scotland 2009 by East Ayrshire Council to write the poems for the groundbreaking exhibition Creative Burns at The Dick Institute, Kilmarnock. Creative Burns was the largest Burns exhibition during Homecoming 2009. Creative Burns set out to explore the importance of Burns as a creative producer but also as an influence to artists and writers working both today and in the past.

Phillipa Aitken, who project managed Creative Burns says: "Creative Burns challenged the notion of Burns as a 'heaven taught ploughman' and explored Burns instead as a conscious artist who was familiar with the works of many poets and writers."

Rab wrote a series of twelve new poems for Creative Burns which frame his take on modern society using the rhythmical Scots language. Among the places Rab visited during the commission are Dean Castle, the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock, and the National Burns Memorial in Mauchline. The poems draw on Burns' own work and themes such as love, literature and Scotland as their shared homeland, using a gently satirical humour to look from the narrator's contemporary world back into the world of Burns.

Born in the Ayrshire village of New Cumnock in 1960, Rab has been writing poetry for most of his adult life. He is becoming recognised as one of Scotland's leading poets and his first major collection, Accent O the Mind, was published in 2005. An earlier significant work is his translation into Scots language of the Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam, originally written in 12th century Persia. In 2008 Rab was the winner of Scotland's premier poetry competition, the McCash Scots Poetry Prize.

The Creative Burns Poetry exhibition in the Midsteeple displays the poems on panels, with headphones so you can listen to Rab reading them aloud.

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