The Human Face

In The Human Face, an impassioned poem-essay in Burns's most celebrated poetic form, Iain Crichton Smith evokes the democratic spirit of Burns in an age starved of tolerance and clarity. This is the poet's most ambitious and risky poem to date. It has the humane scope and sweep of the major poems of MacDiarmid and MacLean, and it is by their measure that Smith must now be appraised. Douglas Dunn wrote in The Times Literary Supplement of 'that purity, that touch of originality, which marks poetry at the limits of intuition and imagining.' Robert Nye in The Times declared of the Collected Poems: 'Crichton Smith's net is quite wide, but its meshes are splendidly small, and he is always catching more than he probably intended.'

Iain Crichton Smith was born in 1928 on the island of Lewis. Educated at Aberdeen University, he became a teacher after national service. In 1977 he resigned to write full time. He received many awards, including the OBE in 1980. He died in 1998. Carcanet publish his Selected Poems (1985), Collected Poems (1992, paper-back 1996), Ends and Beginnings (1995), The Human Face (1997), The Leaf and the Marble (1998) and Selected Stories (1990).