Ron Butlin was Edinburgh’s Makar for six years, and handed on the poetical baton to Christine de Luca in 2014. The Magicians Of Scotland compiles poems Butlin wrote during his time in office, alongside new work. Each poem is accompanied by one of James Hutcheson’s thick ink drawings. As one would expect from someone who has stalked, pen-at-the-ready, the cosmopolitan realm for so long, Butlin’s verse is resolute in addressing modernity, Twitter and all. From the outset he warns himself against the dangers of Scottish pastoralism, or The Highland Syndrome as yours truly likes to call it. In The Electric City Of Heck he interrogates his own longing to return to village life, which he views as "fairly suspect": "Isn’t it time I trashed such childhood fancies?/ After all I live in the electric city/and the electric city lives in me."

The internet inhabits Butlin’s poems in the way it inhabits our lives. Edinburgh has been "digitised,/uploaded to an encrypted site/its inhabitants/given new user names, new passwords." He rarely views the past through the eyes of the past, which is apt as "everyone’s now making up the truth" on their hand-held computers anyway. In The Loch Ness Monster’s Post-Referendum Curse the prehistoric creature is "hauled up from the depths – for a photo-op!/ They websited me! Facebooked me! Youtubed my coils!" Disgraced at his own trivialisation, Nessie downloads all the online brouhaha that has accumulated around him during the Independence debate and promptly deletes the lot. In this sense The Magicians Of Scotland is the modern world seen as a sort of conjurer’s trick, playfully drawing you in with half-truths and then wiping the screen clean.

There are a few duds in the collection where the tone is patronising or quaint and the content not worthy of an erstwhile Makar, but overall Butlin shows an impressive versatility. For the most part his style is meandering and conversational, and his verse full of moments of realisation, excitement and pathos. Celebratory poems about the geologist James Hutton and Professor Peter Higgs sit alongside diatribes against Tony Blair and Trident. Darien II suggests that the Darien disaster could have been averted if those setting out could have googled Panama.

Other poems also reach out beyond Scottish borders. How To Save The World, for instance, is a mock questionnaire that reduces global problems of war and corruption to a bureaucratic box-ticking exercise. And one of the quieter poems, All That We Have, shows Butlin is a deft hand at writing about those small truths poetry is so good at capturing. It describes a lover catching sight of their partner "applying a touch of lipstick" and thinking of how "the longing for all we cannot have/and all that we do have, still overwhelms."