After MacCaig's death, his son, Ewen, decided to edit a new version of the collected poems. His version was published in 2005 as The Poems of Norman MacCaig and superseded the previous Collected Poems published in 1990. There are several significant differences between the two books. In The Poems, the individual poems are arranged chronologically in order of composition rather than accepting their grouping in individual volumes. Also, ninety-nine poems, previously unpublished in books, have been added; the majority of these poems were written in the years immediately prior to 1992 when he stopped writing. MacCaig, from 1947 on, kept a record of each poem as it was written: it was dated by month and year and given a serial number. A few unrecorded poems survive but the system was very methodically adhered to. The final numbered poem, dated January 1992, is number 3,897. He destroyed about 2,800 of his total output as inferior, included almost 700 in the Collected Poems in 1990, and kept 400 unpublished poems which he obviously felt were worth retaining.

It may be that some of the poems were discarded for personal rather than aesthetic reasons but the statistics give evidence of a remarkable productivity (an average of about eighty-five poems a year over forty-five years) and an even more remarkable selfcensorship. When interviewed about his methods of composition, he tended to adopt a pose of nonchalance, wary as always of sounding pompous or over-solemn, and would talk of poems as measured by so many fags, a one-fag poem or a three-fag poem. In fact, most of his poems, certainly of the final twenty years, were written on small sheets of paper (smaller than this page) in his neat, tight handwriting and most kept to one sheet. He wrote: