There have been tantalising snatches of Banks’s poetry scattered across his fiction, with glimpses of poems featuring in The Crow Road and Use of Weapons. Before 1997’s A Song of Stone became a novel, Banks wrote it as a poem, and his very first piece of published work was a poem in New Writing Scotland in 1983 (the poem, an ethereal love lyric called “041”, is included in this book). But he doesn’t seem to have written much poetry at all since the mid-Eighties. The unseen poems in this collection are those he wrote in his 20s.