Robert Crawford

in memory of Michael Longley

The Antrim Glens: you,Edna, Seamus and OvidTeaching us summer.

in memory of John Burnside

One offered us his yellow teapot, then later fell into a Japanese volcano.One always had a twinkle in his cigarette.One motorbiked in leathers on poebiz through central Paris.One carried a dog in a cage.One wrote in fountain pen with a label poking above his...

for Alice

Thus all the books on any given subject are found standing together, and no additions or changes ever separate them.

Melvil Dewey, A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library

Irish

Formal PeopleWaitressing for GodotGirl with Green ThighsA Farewell to Armagh

Scottish

A Drunk Man Licks at the ThistleTed GauntletSunset SnogFife: A...

‘Iwas born before the Industrial Revolution,’ Edwin Muir wrote in The Story and the Fable (1940),

and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a...

When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of...

Age: 22. Time: after 2. RumblingOn western skyline, barrage, tangled tracks, trucks,Jeeps, flags, signposts, dust, oily rags, lorries tumblingOver dark crests, pulverised surface almost liquid, like sticky,Gritty faeces. Men knee-deep in it, goggled facesLost under thick, off-white masks, swigging from hip flasks.

animula blandula vagula

Inside a wide, bucking two-ton, we’re thrownAgainst...