Bard of Friendly Fire 
Robert Crawford
- Robert Burns: Poems edited by Don Paterson
- The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg
It’s hard to call any poet a ‘bard’ now except as an ironic jab. Few poetic terms have shifted in significance so much. When, around 1500, William Dunbar called a rival Scottish poet an ‘Iersche brybour baird’, each word was a studied insult. ‘Iersche’ (Gaelic) was barbarous to Dunbar’s Lowland ear; a ‘brybour’ was a vagabond; a ‘baird’ was a limited sub-poet, not a ‘makar’.
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Robert Crawford, whose Selected Poems were published in 2005, teaches at St Andrews.
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