Robert Crawford

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...

Jorge​ Luis Borges’s visit to the Home of Golf in 1971 is still remembered. Edwin Williamson devotes a page of his 2004 biography to the event, calling attention to Borges’s wish to recite Scottish Border ballads while in St Andrews, and to stand alone beside the North Sea. Not long before, the 71-year-old Borges had published a story called ‘The Congress’ which, as...