THERE is something uncanny about Iain Crichton Smith’s anonymous guisers; their visitation seems appropriate to the eerie spirit and sinister undertow of this weekend’s festival. The piece can be found in Crichton Smith’s New Collected Poems (Carcanet, £18.95).

HALLOWE’EN

Someone was playing the piano when quite suddenly

there they were standing in the room.

They would not sing or speak or tell their names.

Their skull faces blankly shifted round

as if they were studying us implacably.

‘Yokels,’ one said. ‘Rustics,’ said another,

and truly they had come in out of the rain

with their masks tall and white and bony-looking.

‘Macbeth,’ someone said, and someone, ‘Hamlet’.

Or perhaps at least the ‘Elegy’ by Gray.

The rain drummed on the roof and they were gone

In their muddy boots, squelching past cowering doors.

We looked at each other. It was graveyard time

as our black ties on our white shirts might say.