Scottish women's poetry is probably having a better time now than it has ever had, assisted perhaps by important Scottish women of letters like Tessa Ransford, founder of the Scottish Poetry Library and editor of Lines Review, and Joy Hendry, editor of Chapman. The main problem facing women writers today may be the curse of acceptance rather than neglect. For readers not unsurprisingly tend to read their work in terms of a challenge to or resentment of past neglect. This tendency to attribute to women writers the same plot means that the writers are now often being tied down by their readers’ willingness to sympathise with battles that they are not always fighting and certainly not only fighting. Modem psychoanalytic criticism has the danger built into it of teasing out the same story over and over again, but even historical and contextual criticism is usually too willing to read women's writing as having as its sole aim the speaking back of marginalised or even colonised female voices. I hope to show that while it is often the case that women writers are reclaiming lost ground they frequently move on from this reclamation to the planting of crops far more various and exotic than are covered by the simple formula of women's experience. In other words while it would be merely perverse to claim that contemporary women poets are unmotivated by their gendered experience of time and place, we should not feel that pointing out such motivation is tribute enough. This is true, I think, even when poets admit that their project is giving voice to the hitherto voiceless. Speaking of her own poetry in Dream State Elizabeth Bums admits that she is conscious of Scottish poetry as having been a ‘mainly male domain’. Her own poetry, she says, reflects an ‘interest in women's ways of seeing and writing. “Valda's Poem/ Sleevenotes”, for instance, takes the context of the Scottish poetic tradition and wonders how it might appear to a woman looking in from the outside’. The poem was provoked by a sleevenote to Hugh MacDiarmid's record Whaur Extremes Meet with the poet enjoying conversation and whisky with MacCaig, ‘Valda in swimsuit, working in the garden, or keeping the soft-coated Wheaten and Border Terrier quiet for the recording’. Bums, no doubt conscious that the very sleevenote undermines the claims of the record's title, offers Valda's perception of the afternoon.