Robert Crawford

Under the North Sea, a mile off Elie Where once she was noticed in a mullioned window, White lace cap rising, brooding over her table, Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant Translates onto starfish and nacred shells Montalembert’s Monks of the West

Still weary, awash with hackwork to support Dead Maggie, Marjorie, Tiddy and Cecco, Her water babies, breathing ectoplasm, She watches aqualungs...

Younger Scottish writers seem to be preoccupied by gender. It is a theme crucial equally to Duncan McLean’s novel Bunker Man and to Kathleen Jamie’s poetry collection The Queen of Sheba. It is insistent in W.N. Herbert’s poem ‘Featherhood’ and Janice Galloway’s Foreign Parts. It bridges writing as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are wary of each other. Jamie recently refused to read with Irvine Welsh because of what she saw as the misogyny of one of his short stories. Yet even such wariness reinforces a sense that these issues are worth contesting.’

‘The Romantic awakening dates from the production of Ossian,’ Ezra Pound wrote, and he was right. One of James Macpherson’s great contributions to literature was the use of the fragment. His first Ossianic work, the Fragments of Ancient Poetry, published in Edinburgh in 1760, uses in its title and as its form one of the familiar terms of classical scholarship – the ‘fragmentum’ – and deploys it to give authority to the shattered remnants which he has carried over into English from the post-Culloden smash-up of the Gaelic world. Macpherson’s fragments predate and nourish the use of the fragment form by such Continental writers as Novalis and André Chénier. The fragment is a form which speaks of cultural ruin, and of potential re-assembly. It is central to the development of Romanticism, Modernism and Post-Modernism. Just as the Ossianic fragments are part of the aftermath of Culloden, in our own century the greatest uses of the fragment have come in the work of poets writing in the wake of a war which shattered the civilisation they knew. Pound used the form for much of his career and Eliot shored up fragments against his Waste Land ruins.’’

Answer truthfully from your own heart:

1. Rewrite The Waste Land using only English words of one syllable.

2. Rearrange the entire Bible into two columns, one headed KNOWLEDGE, the other WISDOM.

3. How many women did Henry VIII fancy, apart from his wives?

4. Make one of the following dramatic entrances: Natural, Caesarian, Episiotomy.

5. While breathing regularly, count up your limbs and...