Old World

'For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets' -Sunday Herald

Writing out of older Scottish traditions that are ludic, intellectually deft and linguistically complex, Robert Crawford also stands with fellow poets, Liz Lochhead, Douglas Dunn and Simon Armitage as a contemporary master.

Nimbly traversing the globe, Old World is a generous, playful collection featuring the traditional forms of haiku and riddle, versions of Mexican, Chinese, Old English and Greek poems, a tincture of Scots work, and many pieces that present an ageing planet dealing with twenty-first-century issues from European war to climate change and AI.

These poems speak both of the menaced plenitude of living beings, and of frailties associated with growing old. Part of the book is given over to voices of creatures from the non-human world, part to human voices, but boundaries between these categories become mischievously and disconcertingly unstable.

Mixing lyricism, play, and a sense of vulnerable interdependence, Old World draws on both Western and Eastern cultures to articulate through sound, lineation, and silence a sense of the sacredness of life on earth.

Robert Crawford is a poet, biographer, critic and literary historian who has published eight full collections of poetry and many prose books, including Young Eliot. Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, he is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.