In the early twenty-first century it has become something of a rite of mid-career passage for Scottish writers formally to salute the totem that is Robert Burns. This has been the case in recent years for the likes of Robert Crawford, Andrew O'Hagan, Ian Rankin and Don Paterson, all of whom have produced anthologies of Scotland's ‘national bard’. Generally, what these writer-editors produce in common is their choice of the Burns that they feel best speaks both for himself and for the social concerns of his day. Paterson's Faber and Faber selection is the craftiest of all of these, resembling nothing so much as a slim volume such as he might produce of his own work. This is part of Paterson's premeditated ‘modernising’ of Burns, whom he feels to have been appropriated as part of an embarrassing, old-fashioned package of national shibboleth:

Paterson's seemingly stark selection of Burns features only twenty-nine poems and twelve songs chosen from a possible six hundred plus texts. The fourteen blank pages at the end of the paperback edition when it first appeared in 2001 caused puzzlement among a number of Burnsians that these could not have been filled up. Having dismissed in his introduction the cottage-industry of Burns biography, claiming that ‘the character of Robert Burns is so complicated as effectively not to exist at all – there is barely a human trait which he did not exhibit at one time or another’ and seeing not only in his poetry but in his correspondence ‘a doomed project to attempt to reconstruct Burns's character’, Paterson is determined to let Burns breathe in a different way, on the page (Burns vii).

As well as blank pages, Paterson allows two four-line works a page of their own. The tactic is very different from the numerous collections of Burns's work which often feature multiple short poems crammed into a single page.