David Craig, who died in 2021, taught creative writing at Lancaster. As well as poetry and fiction, he wrote books about climbing, such as Native Stones, and On the Crofters’ Trail and The Glens of Silence, about the Highland Clearances.
It keeps on doing its best, That reddish thing inside me Pumping-pumping against The obstinate, tortuous fankle Of pulpy valves and tubeworms.
Are they up to it any more – Thin-skinned, semi-elastic, A labyrinth of Victorian sewers, A sort of organic circuit board That badly needs rewiring?
Titanium would do better, A tiny refined-alloy sleeve Inserted deep in the...
Under each leaflet of a bracken frond The spores are as neatly herring-boned As filaments in a moth’s antenna Or vanes on a pigeon’s quill.
I wrote these images on a bramble leaf. The ink dried slowly, glistening in relief, Black juice on chlorophyll. I could have gone on writing But the green page was full.
ConjunctionA seed on a parachute lingers in air, White...
David Craig has an unfashionable concern with truth-telling in fiction. In his earlier role as a literary critic, he wrote a book called The Real Foundations in which he showed how some of the...
‘Just inside the fir-dusk a hollow oblong of stones now showed, brown and damp with that stupefied or browbeaten look of an abandoned croft-house ... Here was Unnimore.’ Here, too,...
I admire mountain, rock and ice-climbing from a respectful distance. When young and foolish, I tried it. I even went up what some experienced climbers call ‘the milk run’ to the peak...
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