My Heart’s In the Highlands: Classic Scottish Poems is a glorious celebration of poetry and verse by the greatest classic Scottish poets, and introduced by the acclaimed poet John Glenday.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. The poems in this collection are selected by editor, Gaby Morgan.

With poems from famous Scottish writers such as Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Mary Queen of Scots herself there is plenty here to enjoy and inspire. The collection roams across so many aspects of Scottish life and culture; its landscape and its history, its people and its celebrations. It’s a country that has always inspired poets to write about love, nature and heritage, and to reflect on the important things of life.

Selected Poems collects the work of one of our foremost lyric poets, John Glenday. The elemental themes long associated with Glenday's name are strongly represented here: the sea, the sky; light and its absence; the spirit in the secular age; our natural and human ecologies, how they interact, and how they might survive the encounter; the transcendent states that arise from the simple contemplation of the earth; the hidden dimensions that lie behind familiar objects - and the hells, heavens and secret lives that hide within their very names. But new readers will also find a wonderful poet of familial and romantic love, as well as a sly humourist and satirist; as the book also features work from long-out-of-print early collections, they will also discover that Glenday's voice has always been uniquely his own. Glenday shares with W.S. Graham and Denise Riley an obsession with speech, silence, and limits of knowledge, and with what form the energies that flicker along the border might take. John Glenday is poet who constantly blindsides and moves us, whose direct and pure lyric brings us, again and again, face-to-face with the mystery of our being here.

After the success of Grain (shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, poetry's most prestigious international award) John Glenday returns with The Golden Mean. Glenday's poetry - once something of a closely guarded secret - now has many devotees, and this new book shows why: Glenday's mastery of the short translucent lyric and his unashamed and direct concern with matters of the spirit, of love, of human nature and natural law - means he can often read as a Spanish or East European poet in immaculate translation. But for all its apparently weightless and aerodynamic grace, Glenday's poetry can be playful, experimental and occasionally even surreal, and his voice local and intimate. The Golden Mean shows Glenday's full range, and a poet at the height of his imaginative powers.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is perhaps the greatest surviving work of early Mesopotamian literature. According to legend, Gilgamesh built the city walls of Uruk, modern-day Iraq, to protect his people from external threats. Although the epic records events from more than four thousand years ago, those events echo many of the social and cultural concerns of Iraq today. In this luminous bilingual collection of poems, Ghareeb Iskander offers a personal response to the epic. Iskander's modern-day Gilgamesh is a nameless Iraqi citizen who witnessed the fall of the dictatorship, who exists in a constant state of threat, and who dreams, not about eternity, but simply about life. While Gilgamesh was searching for the elixir of life, Iskander's hero is searching for consolation.

Though John Glenday has long been admired for his lyrically delicate and emotionally powerful poetry, he has remained something of a well-kept secret. His third collection, "Grain," makes his singular talent available to a wider audience. Sometimes Glenday's poems are forcefully direct; sometimes they are so quiet they feel as if they were composed within a capacious listening, as a form of secular prayer. Glenday's seamless lyric can also disguise some wild and surreal tales: the Beauty and the Beast told in reverse, a bizarre list of new saints, or a can of peaches waiting for the invention of the tin-opener. However, the lasting impression is of a genuinely spiritual poet, one with the ability to turn every earthly detail towards the same clear light. "Grain" announces Glenday as an essential voice in contemporary poetry.