"A rich exploration of Eliot's life, his grinding labors and excoriating intelligence." —Edna O'Brien, The New York Times Book ReviewThe award-winning biographer Robert Crawford presents us with the first volume of a comprehensive account of the poetic genius of T.S. Eliot. Young Eliot traces the life of the twentieth century's most important poet from his childhood in St. Louis to the publication of his revolutionary poem "The Waste Land." Crawfor...

**Traversing the globe, Old World is a generous, playful collection about the issues facing our planet today, from a major Scots poet and biographer of T.S. Eliot'For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed' Sunday Herald**Mixing lyricism, play, and vulnerability, Old World explores the issues facing our planet in the twenty-first century, from European war to climate change and AI. From riddles and haikus...

No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns and no biographer has captured his energy, brilliance and radicalism as well as Robert Crawford does in The Bard. To his international admirers Burns was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was 'sprung...from raking of dung', and to his political enemies a 'traitor'. Drawing on a surprising variety of untapped sources - from rediscovered poetry by Burns...

Young Eliot: From St. Louis to "The Waste Land" was hailed as "exceptional" and "assiduous" ( The New York Times). Robert Crawford's meticulous, incisive scholarship continues in Eliot After "The Waste Land", an invaluable record of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet, and troubled man.After being kept from the public for more than fifty years, the letters between T. S. Eliot and his longtime love and muse Emily Hale were unsealed ...

SPIRIT MACHINES, Robert Crawford's fourth collection, attends imaginatively to the fusion of spiritual experience and the insistently material world. In several of the poems, emotional and religious insights merge lyrically with modern technologies of information. The title sequence deals with bereavement and memorializes the poet's father, who died in1997, while the serio-comical catechism of 'A Life-Exam' arises from the experience of hospitalisation. The imaginative, 360-line tour de fo...

One of Scotland’s most celebrated poets, Robert Crawford has long been a passionate and articulate ambassador for his country and its culture, its people and its landscape. The Scottish Ambassador fuses individual and communal voices in poems that resonate far beyond their points of origin. Engaging with Zoroastrian, Chinese and Greek as well as with Scottish antecedents, Crawford’s poems have an arresting range and a lyrical energy. He negotiates with intensity and wit between a ...

Writings about the Scottish island from throughout history and today, from the likes of novelists, poets, playwrights, saints, queens, and more.This anthology is comprised of creative prose, nonfiction, and poetry that ranges from St. Columba to the present day, all linked by the isle of Iona. Featuring specially commissioned work by Meaghan Delahunt, Jennie Erdal, Sara Lodge, Victoria Mackenzie, Candia McWilliam, Ruth Thomas, and Alice Thompson, this wonderful coll...

To make a testament is to attempt to pass on what matters most. In his seventh full-length collection of poems Robert Crawford writes of love, loss, belief, and commitment. Whether in intimate erotic lyrics or in a sustained engagement with the politics of Scottish independence he writes with passion, wit, and assurance about struggles to pass on values and treasures. The book opens with a sequence of love poems, and closes with ‘Testament’, a startlingly fresh gathering of deftly rhymed p...

Robert Crawford's new collection is an exhilarating celebration of the world he lives in: his family, his fellow Scots, his country and his country's languages. Beginning with a group of moving, renewing love poems to his wife, the book builds into a polyphonic hymn to life in all its aspects.There is a powerful sense of communion and connection in The Tip of My Tongue: while singing the Scottish part of the planet, Crawford also embraces the rhythms of the whole circumfer...

Holding in balance the ecological and the technological, ancient and modern, Full Volume sings languages and cultures, people and habitats burgeoning on the brink of extinction. From revved-up battle-cry to nervous whisper, these lyrical poems praise intricate abundance.Assured in its rhymes and cadences, Full Volume is often attentive to poetry in other tongues, not least Gaelic. As their tones and forms shift from the spiritual to the wry, from haiku to bros...

From Treasure Island to Trainspotting, Scotland's rich literary tradition has influenced writing across centuries and cultures far beyond its borders. Here, for the first time, is a single volume presenting the glories of fifteen centuries of Scottish literature.In Scotland's Books poet Robert Crawford tells the story of Scottish writing and its relationship to the country's history. Stretching from the medieval masterpiece of St Columba's Iona -...

In MASCULINITY, Robert Crawford elegantly explores many aspects of that troubling concept, from imperial militarism to his own experiences as father, husband, and son. By turn affectionate and amusing, painful and self-excoriating, Crawford wryly examines, sometimes in intimate detail, what it is to be male - from awkward, unsporty and even more awkward adolescent, to husband, father of a child and, apparently, New Man. Clever, accessible, very funny and chillingly accurate, MASCULINITY is...