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Old World

£13.00

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 21st-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.

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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 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.

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

‘In his hands, all modern life can be poetry’ Herald

Read a sample here