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‘Airtins’ means directions: in these poems, Hershaw re-imagines the moral guidance in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, applying a similar outlook to the modern problems of poverty, inequality and wars. Hershaw uses the vivid, demotic cadences of the Scots language to express a vision of a practical, green and spiritual socialism.
The Scots language is used by 2.5 million Scots and for Hershaw is not only the ‘vyce o the fowk’ but an anti-establishment tongue, a rebel tongue well suited to taking on hypocrisy, injustice and tyranny.
Airtins is a fully engaged poetry collection seeking a better world, where nature and man can live peaceably and harmoniously, a socialist antidote to our class-based world of ever more exploitation and extraction from ourselves, each other and our planet.
The collection is illustrated with delicately rendered watercolours of flowers – snowdrop, Scottish primrose, dandelion and rosehip – taking us into a more tranquil environment, one that has not only an oriental mood but what Robert Louis Stevenson called ‘a strong Scots accent of mind.’
‘Airtins’ means directions: in these poems, Hershaw re-imagines the moral guidance in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, applying a similar outlook to the modern problems of poverty, inequality and wars. Hershaw uses the vivid, demotic cadences of the Scots language to express a vision of a practical, green and spiritual socialism.
The Scots language is used by 2.5 million Scots and for Hershaw is not only the ‘vyce o the fowk’ but an anti-establishment tongue, a rebel tongue well suited to taking on hypocrisy, injustice and tyranny.
Airtins is a fully engaged poetry collection seeking a better world, where nature and man can live peaceably and harmoniously, a socialist antidote to our class-based world of ever more exploitation and extraction from ourselves, each other and our planet.
The collection is illustrated with delicately rendered watercolours of flowers – snowdrop, Scottish primrose, dandelion and rosehip – taking us into a more tranquil environment, one that has not only an oriental mood but what Robert Louis Stevenson called ‘a strong Scots accent of mind.’