Robert Crawford (1) (1959–)

Crawford has delivered an astonishing literary biography. Crawford is clearly enamored with his subject yet manages to maintain a remarkable balance of both affection and cold analysis. The book is a fascinating mix of gossip and literary scholarship. The sheer effort to decode and dissect Eliot's early influences is nothing short of remarkable. I cannot imagine in the future recommending Eliot's poems without mentioning this work in the same breath.

Equally deft is the author's sensitive yet show more smart portrait of the extremely complicated figure of Vivienne Eliot, one-half of one of the most interesting marriages in literary history. Vivienne is a difficult figure to capture and Crawford succeeds by never trying to pin her down as villain, vixen or witch.

Crawford's Eliot was a man both strange and normal, ordinary and extraordinary, doomed and saved. He is hard to like, yet endearing. show less

I love the poems and songs of Robert Burns and have several of them by heart. Given the slightest encouragement, I'll recite for you in my best faux-Scots. I saw this on my library's New Books shelf and had to bring it home. I found it to be a punishingly scholarly look at Robert Burns. It's in chronological order, but has enough erudite explications and diversions that I lost the thread of Burns' life numerous times and had to go back several pages to re-orient myself. Exhaustive and show more exhausting, this book purports to be an accessible biography, but I found it ponderous and far more like a doctoral thesis than a narrative. To be fair, it does a wonderfully thorough job of placing Burns in his time and explaining much about the milieu in which he moved. There's just too much of it for the likes of me. show less

Collection by leading Scottish poet.

While much of Crawford's inspiration is drawn from history, place, and technology - with poems on disparate locations such as Wyoming, France, and the Shetlands; poems covering subjects such as the Aztecs and the Bronze Age; poems on broadband and Satnav - some of the most impressive poems drawn their inspiration from other poets. There are versions of poems by writers like Paz and Pessoa, not to mention a number of reworkings of Latin poems by Scottish show more writers like George Buchanan. The Latin ones provide the subject matter for the majority of the longer poems in the collection, and tend to be meatier and grittier than Crawford's own more playful work. (This does raise interesting questions about poetry in translation - just whose poems are we now reading? The original author's or the translator's).

Crawford's poetry may not be philosophically or intellectually the deepest but these are sharp, enjoyable poems. Worth searching out.


THE KIRK

Good for directions, creeds, and mysteries
Of blood-bead, mustard seed, bread, water, wine,

You're part of the horizon in our midst
Skymark and landmark, take-off point, and stark

Terminal building where, at start or finish,
Some seek the spirit like a mislaid passport

To daily light, or past the Milky Way's
Communing disc of otherworldly stars;

Some live God's sums of plenitude and loss,
Christ on the cross and then the Christless cross;

Some hear the seasoned Word clear as a bell;
And some, an inch, a clinch, a world away,

Touch and discover what it is to love
The carved wall of a church that's without walls.

YING AND YANG
after Pessoa

In my body you scour the sgurr
For its sun buried deep in the forest.
In your body I search for the boat
Let slip in the middle of the night. show less

"In _Scotland's Books- poet Robert Crawford tells the story of Scottish imaginative writing and its relationship to the country's history. Stretching from the medieval masterpiece of St. Columba's Iona - the earliest surviving Scottish work - to the energetic work of twenty-first century writing by authors such as Ali Smith and James Kelman, this outstanding account traces the development of literature in Scotland and explores the cultural, linguistic and literary heritage of the nation. It show more includes extracts from the writing discussed to give a flavour of the original work, and its new research ranges from specially made translations of ancient poems to previously unpublished material from the Scottish Enlightenment and interviews with living writers. Informative and readable, this is the definitive single-volume guide to the marvellous legacy of Scottish literature." - Penguin jacket notes
Robert Crawford is a Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at St. Andrew's University, and has published six collections of poetry. With Mick Imlah he edited the Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (2006).
The book includes 15 photographs of manuscripts and books in the collections of the University of St. Andrew's. show less