New technology will be used to showcase the best of contemporary Scottish poetry in two online poetry publications, to be launched on St Andrew’s Day.

The Poetry Map of Scotland and Best Scottish Poems 2004 will be available on the Scottish Poetry Library website www.spl.org.uk from Tuesday 30 November.

The Poetry Map of Scotland is an interactive website map of Scotland, leading users to landmarks and landscapes about which poems have been written by living poets. Edited by poet Valerie Gillies, it makes available the full text of over 100 Scottish poems, along with biographical notes.

Readers can click on an area of the map to select poems by location and are encouraged to contribute to the development of the map by suggesting a contemporary poem to be included. The Poetry Map of Scotland will be updated each November.

With Scottish tourism organisations increasingly focusing on Scotland’s literary heritage, The Poetry Map of Scotland offers a unique and innovative facility for cultural tourists, whether actual or virtual.

Best Scottish Poems consists of twenty of the best poems by Scottish authors to appear during 2003/04. Each poem is accompanied by an author’s note, an editor’s comment, a biography of the poet and a selection of related links.
The editor will change each year; this year’s editor is anthologist, publisher and poet Hamish Whyte.

His choices include some familiar names (Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead, Edwin Morgan) along with a number of less well-known poets. In his introduction, Whyte explains:

There were two possible approaches in the selection: either attempt to represent as wide a range as possible or ‘plump for the poems that you like best’. I've plumped for the personal choice option. I like an anthology with an agenda, although I'm not sure what the agenda of this one is – in its simplest form it might be ‘poems I liked which made me laugh and think’.

The aim of both projects, which have been made possible by the Scottish Arts Council Lottery Fund, is to provide a way in to contemporary Scottish poetry for readers at home and abroad. The selected poems suggest the range and achievement of Scottish poets, their languages, their forms, their concerns.

For those who can't visit the Scottish Poetry Library in person, these virtual samples are the next best thing.