Janet,
I think some part of reading is always encountering the foreign, isn't it--the idiom not only of another country, even an English-speaking one, but also of another mind, another whole set of experiences. Faulkner can be almost as strange to a Northerner in America as he might be to an Australian. I've just gone through page proofs of the excerpt of Ludlow that will appear in the fall Hudson, and have noticed the editor's queries about specific mining slang that I have chosen not to footnote. Most Americans will not know that "bony" can be a synonym for "slag." But it was important to me to use the term actually used by people in this place rather than the more convenient and familiar word, and trust my readers to figure it out from the context over time. One of my characters is also from Ayrshire, where my wife was born and raised, and I've tried to catch his dialect without straining spelling, but mostly in grammar and a few choice vocabulary words like "scunnered," one of my very favorite Scottish words. So my hope is that American readers will find something rather exotic in the diction of my poem, and that the exoticism will contribute to a richness of reading. We shall see.
I do very much believe in using the local color of language all you can.
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