Robert Crawford (Scottish poet)

Not to be confused with Robert Crawford (Scottish poet, died 1733).

Robert Crawford FRSE FBA (born 1959) is a Scottish poet, scholar and critic. He is emeritus Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. He writes in both Scots and English.

Quotes

To love you needs more details than the Book of Kells

• Ghetto-makars, tae the knackirs'
  Wi aw yir schemes, yir smug dour dreams
  O yir ain feet. Yi're beat
  By yon new Scoatlan loupin tae yir street...
  • "Ghetto-Blastir", st. 1, in Sterts & Stobies (1985)

• Throw all your stagey chandeliers in wheel-barrows and move them north
  To celebrate my mother's sewing-machine
  And her beneath an eighty-watt bulb, pedalling
  Iambs on an antique metal footplate.
  • "Opera", in A Scottish Assembly (1990)

• Semiconductor country, land crammed with intimate expanses,
  Your cities are superlattices, heterojunctive
  Graphed from the air, your cropmarked farmlands
  Are epitaxies of tweed.
  • "Scotland", st. 1, in A Scottish Assembly (1990)

• Among circuitboard crowsteps
  To be miniaturised is not small-minded.
  To love you needs more details than the Book of Kells —
  Your harbours, your photography, your democratic intellect
  Still boundless, chip of a nation.
  • "Scotland", st. 4, in A Scottish Assembly (1990)

• Thinking of Helensburgh, J. G. Frazer
  Revises flayings and human sacrifice;
  Abo of the Celtic Twilight, St Andrew Lang
  Posts him a ten-page note on totemism
  And a coloured fairy book.
  • "Scotland in the 1890s", in A Scottish Assembly (1990)

• James Murray combs the dialect from his beard
  And files slips for his massive Dictionary.
  • "Scotland in the 1890s", in A Scottish Assembly (1990)

• ... Listen —
  Not to dour centuries of trudging,
  Marching, and taking orders;
  Today I have heard the feet of my country
  Breaking into a run.
  • "Radio Scottish Democracy", in Talkies (1992)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Robert Crawford (Scottish poet) on Wikipedia