Robert Crawford - Full Volume

CONTENTS

Listening, love, and a quickened awareness of vulnerability enrich the Scottish poet Robert Crawfords sixth collection of poems. 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 brosnachadh, the poems resonance and music build into a sustained sounding of what it means to live, love, and listen in a world where Nothing is ever single. Robert Crawford was born in Lanarkshire in 1959.

His first collection, A Scottish Assembly, was published in 1990. His Selected Poems (Cape, 2005) was awarded the Poetry Book Societys Special Recommendation. Author of Scotlands Books (Penguin, 2007) and co-editor of The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews. Author photograph Alice Crawford Jonathan Cape Random House 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW IV 2SA www.randomhouse.co.uk

POETRY A Scottish AssemblySharawaggi (with W.N. Herbert) TalkiesMasculinitySpirit MachinesThe Tip of My TongueSelected PoemsApollos of the North ANTHOLOGIES ed., Other Tongues: Young Scottish Poetsin English, Scots, and Gaelic ed., with Simon Armitage, The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 ed., with Mick Imlah, The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse ed., with Meg Bateman and James McGonigal, Scottish Religious Poetry ed., The Book of St Andrews CRITICISM The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S.

EliotDevolving English LiteratureIdentifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth-CenturyPoetryThe Modern PoetScotlands Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature ed., Robert Burns and Cultural Authority ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature ed., Heaven-Taught Fergusson ed., Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science A poet of great importance... fluent, inventive, funny, crackling with intellectual energy and at the very heart of our own time, Iain Crichton Smith, Scotsman Robert Crawfords [writing] seems imbued with a limitless sense of possibility and fecundity. Like that of his Scots contemporaries, Kathleen Jamie and W.N. Herbert, Crawfords imaginative power seems to have grown in tandem with Scotlands own cultural and political confidence, and much of his work could be read as a delighted immersion in the history and the atlas of what Crawford has called his chip of a nation. Sean OBrien, Sunday Times Robert Crawford is one of the most distinctive of these new virtuosi. Carol Rumens, Independent Intellect, wit and word-playfulness enter the personal, emotive terrain of heritage and heartland, of implacable stones and acoustic ghosts, of heart and intellect poised and yoked. Tom Adair, Scotland on Sunday Intelligent, witty, funny... Tom Adair, Scotland on Sunday Intelligent, witty, funny...

These fine, acute poems, full of tight creases of meaning and sharp twists of language, show us better than most new fiction what is being lost and found every day in contemporary Scotland. James Wood, Guardian One of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Scottish literature. Keith Bruce, Heraldfor Alice, Lewis, and Blythwith loveIm truly sorry Mans dominionHas broken Natures social union Robert Burns

When you are faced with two alternatives Choose both. And should they put you to the test, Tick every box. Nothing is ever single. A seeds a trees a ships a constellation.

Nail your true colours to this branching mast.

In my body you scour the sgurr For its sun buried deep in the forest. In your body I search for the boat Let slip in the middle of the night. Fights and kisses, touch and go, Body-heat and cool, wedding-day downpour, Tin yin fused to the yang of copper, I want our Bronze Age to last forever. If simple, it would all be over. Sometimes full volume is a breathy whisper.

Theres something I need to say. You tilt your ear Towards loves ensuing, lifelong pent-up silence Crackling with all you want, but fear to hear.

In this windy town of lamps and horizons, Corbels and kissed, martyred stone, Where broadband flits down slim, carved vennels, Sunlight projecting pinecone shadows Under the water of the lade, At the end of a leyline that runs forever Past playing-fields at Canongate Primary School Where all the clauses are linked by cartwheels, At the very centre of this off-centre town We come together, lost and found. The global village doesnt mean the globe But somewhere like that warm pub in St Andrews We kissed in before seeing on television How all the chemicals that make our bodies First emigrated here from far, raw stars. At the Botanics, late, I stand under, I understand a gean tree, suddenly, Kyotoishly eyeing its blossoms at night, its white lamplit flutter by my mouth petal on petal not grown up root and branch, more levitated or flounced down from stars, a damp nebular dance, a drifted spring manna here not yet landed Where each of us with thanks must take our time. The lie I live is different from yours. The lie I live is different from yours.

I will be true to it until I die, Faithful forever to the trompe loeil truth Of the bee-orchid or the fishing fly.

I swear by the unfallen broch of Mousa, I swear by fallen Snarravoe on Unst That it is possible to rise above them Over the rainbowed green nub of The Knab, And sense, way out at earths circumference, Sceptical London, Laramie, Hong Kong Who doubt the arctic tern-packed broch of Mousa Or Snarravoe on Unst are as they are, But, knowing such disbelief, go on believing In voes and fluff, in monuments and rain Below the wings pale rind, and keep faith both With the soaked planets whole revealed horizon And with home ground, the national smudge of Scotland That holds my wife, our daughter, and our son. Since each is shaped by all its drift, by every updraft from high cloud to ground, in all the history of the world a snowflakes double cant be found. Since each is shaped by all its drift, by every updraft from snowflake to ground, in all the history of the world a high clouds double cant be found. A world of difference flecks each word. A days work is never done. A days work is never done.

Its dawn always somewhere, time to clot a hole with leaves, to scar and scour clay, to let a river drift and lift its bed away, or sky a stone upright or fly between sheets of rain, and touch down again, reach out and along the same strong, shaped, reshaped new ground forever.

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