Robert Crawford

Robert Crawford on Old World

'A poet of great importance... fluent, inventive, funny, crackling with intellectual energy, and at the very heart of our own time' Scotsman

We are looking forward to Robert joining us this autumn for his new poetry collection.

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
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 to verse influenced by both Western and Eastern cultures, Crawford arrives at a sense of sacredness of life on earth.
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.

Robert Crawford is a poet, biographer, critic and literary historian who has published eight full collections of poetry and many prose books, including two major biographies of T.S. Eliot: Young Eliot and Eliot After The Waste Land. 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. His poetry has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and he has won two Scottish Arts Council Book Awards as well as the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.