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.
A version in Scots of a Sumerian hymn to the goddess of love and war, attributed to the priestess Enheduanna of Ur (fl. 2255 BCE), the world’s earliest identifiable author. As well as praising the nurturing but also terrifying and vengeful goddess, daughter of the moon, the poem inveighs against the rebel King Lu-gal-an-ne, who has flung Enheduanna out of the goddess’s temple.
Leddy...
in memory of Michael Longley
The Antrim Glens: you,Edna, Seamus and OvidTeaching us summer.
Sumin 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...
Sounding out phrases in letters as well as in verse kept things going for T.S. Eliot: he needed a low level of compositional hum. Like a secular spiritual exercise, the letters to Emily Hale sustained...
Can places, like people, have a personality, a set of things you can love or not love? Do countries speak? Do lakes and mountains offer a guide to living? Could you feel let down by a city? Can...
The late Bernard Crick, who had a fine and memorable funeral in Edinburgh the other day, left a legacy of sharp opinions behind him. Among the least popular was his opinion of the British...
Robert Fergusson died in Edinburgh’s Bedlam on 17 October 1774. He was 24 years old. He had been admitted to the asylum three months before, against his will, because his mother could no...
Anthologies are powerful things: movements are launched, periods are parcelled up, writers are made and broken. They are, or want to be, the book world’s performative utterances: defining...
Until recently, the notion that the academic subject called ‘English’ had any sort of history would have seemed rather odd. Hadn’t it always just, well, existed? Surely, at his...
In books that go on about how the English have imposed their language and their manners on other English-speaking nations (Australian, Canadian, Scottish and Welsh and Irish, others), what is...
Whether in person or in print, self-consciousness is unsettling. Self-conscious writers, like self-conscious speakers, can’t help betraying that they’re more concerned with their...
‘The idea that Eliot’s poetry was rooted in private aspects of his life has now been accepted,’ says Lyndall Gordon in the Foreword to her second volume of biographical rooting...
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