Robert Burns' songs and poems are widely known and loved. Burns' Night is cause for universal celebration. But the most fervent admirer will admit that it is sometimes difficult to fathom exactly what the poet means.
It is easy to forget that he transformed a dialect of Scottish peasantry into high poetry and that he wrote two hundred years ago.
William Curran has done all Burns' admirers a great service by translating the best of his oeuvre into modern English while retaining the sense, rhythms and flavour of the original.

Curran's anthology makes it magnificently clear that Burns was more than the 'Heaven-taught Ploughman' of popular legend. Whether reworking an ancient story, describing the pleasures and pains of love, the inquities of a local laird or the hypocrisies of kirk and state, he does so with charm always succinct and a compassion never cruel.

My name-sake, Sir Samuel Curran, one time Principal and Vice Chancellor of Strathclyde University, kindly wrote a foreword to the book, stating amongst other things : "He deserves all the esteem that application such as that of the author brings to his cause. I feel a real gap is being filled by publication of this work and I do hope it proves a blessing to a great many new followers of the poet"

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