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“... a cup. In the 18 miniatures of this sequence, making up just over one hundred and fifty words, Iain CrichtonSmith gives us a picture of the world he came from. His deployment of a fishing-boat name, The Golden Rose, suggests a milieu with its own sense of splendour, offsetting rigid Presbyterianism. The poem ends ...”

“... is more Anglocentric: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is in facing-page English, but Sorley MacLean and Iain CrichtonSmith, for example, occur only in English, and there is no Welsh-language poetry at all. On the other hand, O’Brien’s selection of English-language poetry casts a wider and more ambitious net. ‘Even as ...”

“... Crawford, allows Graham 20 pages (as against 35 for MacDiarmid, 22 for Robert Garioch, 21 for Iain CrichtonSmith), and in his fair-minded Introduction Dunn painfully acknowledges why Graham is little honoured in Scotland: ‘he lived furth of Scotland for most of his adult life, and loved Cornwall. His relative ...”

“... has been asked to do a new Oxford anthology, though the youngest poet in their extant volume, Iain CrichtonSmith, is now a sprightly 68. Watson’s model is not the Oxford or the Penguin, but Hugh MacDiarmid’s Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry, first published in 1940 and reissued by Canongate in 1993. This was ...”

“... bookshelf. But then, in the early Seventies, two things occurred which made the spark jump: I read Iain CrichtonSmith’s translations, Poems to Eimhir, and I heard MacLean himself read his own poems in the original Gaelic. To take the translations first, since they were my first exposure: opening the book was like ...”

“... on his choice). Finding the politics of that book layered on too thickly, the American poet Dave Smith described the effect in terms strangely reminiscent of life on board the Suvorov: ‘a show of skills which has, too often, the feel of trial military manoeuvres with no apparent enemy’. But in many ways The Donkey’s Ears is unusual for the political ...”

“... lay the lash             To your posteriors. Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown and Iain CrichtonSmith appear in Morgan’s anthology, but they are not at their best. Perhaps the only real satirist among contemporary Scottish poets is Robert Garioch. Influenced by Robert Fergusson, by way of the ...”

“... and vermin need more protection than the flocks and crops. In Crisis and Conservation Charlie Pye-Smith and Chris Rose marshal such arguments. The one characteristic which measures aesthetic and ecological value objectively is complication. The greater the number of species, and the greater the variety of the habitats supporting them, the better; theory and ...”

“... a touching poem ends with the word ‘touch’ which, even more than seeing, is believing. Iain CrichtonSmith’s Selected Poems is a volume too slim to give more than glancing impressions of his career. It suggests enough variety of theme – there are poems about Lenin, Aberdeen, Freud, Miss Brodie’s ...”

“... poets with their country expansiveness: I’m thinking of Norman MacCaig in his Assynt mode; Iain CrichtonSmith of the Highlands; George Mackay Brown in his Orkney remoteness; and Hugh MacDiarmid, always in among the fields and dykes, metaphysical or real. None of these men gave much quarter, and, next to ...”