W. N. Herbert

Forked Tongue is a book balanced between opposites. At its heart are two groups of poems: The Cortina Sonata in English, and The Landfish in Scots. Both engage with the problem of re-creating a suppressed culture: Can a myth be ersatz? What is an inauthentic word? How complex is "Scottishness" permitted to be? Buttressed with recent poetry in both tongues, Forked Tongue mixes old and new, both startling English and untypical Scots. Like the gairfish or dolphins which speed through the Scots work, Forked Tongue is both fish and mammal. In its geographic sweep and linguistic range, Forked Tongue offers a new definition of what we call "British" poetry.

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