Robert Crawford (Scottish Poet) - Reviews

Reviews

His work has met with critical acclaim.

The voice of this poetry is engaging and likeable.
- Peter McDonald, Literary Review His Selected Poems is a revelation. Crawford is a very fine poet indeed. This book is aglitter with surprise, with new ways of seeing, of hearing, and of feeling... This astounding collection, rich also in wit, is a book to be homesick for.
- Candia McWilliam, The Scotsman

Hugh MacDiarmid once wrote a poem which contained the line: "Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small ?" Over the past dozen years, Robert Crawford has devoted much industry to soothing MacDiarmid's incredulity. Crawford specialises in poems about Scottish places and people, eulogising not only literary figures but scientists and engineers, such as Henry Bell, James Clerk Maxwell and John Logie Baird, men associated with railways, steam and primitive models of the television. The native genius blends with native chippiness in lines such as: "When World War II ended / Baird equipment broadcast victory in the Savoy / But not one diner said cheerio when you faded".

Leaving this aside, what's appealing about Crawford is the musicality of his language, the surety of his lines and use of enjambement, all abundantly on display in his new Selected Poems. The pieces included here from his first collection, A Scottish Assembly (1990), still feel fresh and energetic, the work of a young writer in the best sense -- inventive, varied, alive with the possibilities inherent in the act of putting words together.

This is primarily a book about contemporary poetry, and what poetry can do now, as seen through its engagement with aspects of contemporary science. It is only fleetingly a book about ‘science and poetry’, where the relationship between two kinds of discipline might be propounded, and it is all the better for letting such moves remain incidental.

Robin Purves has found him a bad poet:

In his collection of essays, Identifying Poets, Robert Crawford claims to use Bakhtin to examine "the way 20th Century poets construct for themselves an identity which allows them to identify with or to be identified with a particular territory" (1) and how they "come to be taken as spokespeople for these territories". (2) A skim through the contents page of his first book of poems, A Scottish Assembly, ....an orgy of naming which at least suggests, before I have examined a single poem in detail, that Crawford's own poetic project is an attempt to "construct for an identity which allows to identify with or to be identified with a particular territory" (3), a strategy which ought to result in him being "taken as spokes" (4) for the territory called Scotland, if the argument in Identifying Poets is to believed. The following essay reads Crawford's poem "Scotland" in an attempt to isolate the points where its rhetoric and syntax go hand-in-hand with a mystificatory and unreflective politics of place.