Robert Crawford was Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at St Andrews until 2020. He is the author of Young Eliot, Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’, The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography and Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination, 1314-2014, as well as several collections of poems, including A Scottish Assembly, Full Volume and Testament.
God-mulch. Apollo. Coventina. Snapped-off moons and pre-Christian crosses
Pit the tor. Comeback king, Midas-touch Mithras, his moorland shrines
Dank caves or knee-high proto-kirks North-west of Hexham, waits
First for microbial, then feather-thin, Then skull-thick, unscabbarded dawn
Butchering the bull-black darkness, Cutting Christmas Eve’s throat.
Mithraic puddles freeze...
For those brought up to associate Scottishness with silence, exile and cunning, much Scots verse sounds megaphonically noisy. ‘You’ve a good Scots tongue in your heid,’ generations of mothers have told their children, preparing them to meet royalty, headmasters, Sloane Rangers or public transport officials. This lore of speaking out is evident in the poetry of thieving,...
There they are, bonny fechters, rank on tattery rank, Murderer-saints, missionaries, call-centre workers, Tattoos, Bunneted tartans weaving together Darkest hours, blazes of glory, Led by a First Bawheid, rampant, hair fizzin, sheepsheared, Scrummin doon, pally wi their out-of-town allies, Wallace fae Califaustralia, Big Mac, an Apple Mac, Back from the backwoods, wi Rob...
Smile at that tiny poem and it will sparkle back at you. It is a novel the size of an egg-cup. The first in a sequence of individually numbered ‘Gaelic Stories’, its strength lies in mischievous enjambments. Others that follow confine in very few words life-dramas that have a humorous patina, yet could tilt toward the tragic:‘
The ritual of the taxi ride to my uncle’s funeral, its names Leuchars, Pitlessie, Blairgowrie, Kippen, Balfron.
Passing a village shop whose window reads YOU CAN’T TOP TUNNOCKS, I save the striped wrapper of a Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer.
All my family are graduates of that chocolate coating, loyal to its sticky texture on the teeth.
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