Crawford, Robert
CRAWFORD, Robert
Nationality: Scottish. Born: Bellshill, Lanarkshire, 23 February 1959. Education: West Coats Primary School, Cambuslang, Glasgow, 1964–69; Hutchesons' Grammar School, Glasgow, 1969–77; University of Glasgow, 1977–81, M.A. (honors) 1981; University of Oxford, 1981–84, D.Phil. 1985. Family: Married Alice Wales in 1988; one son and one daughter. Career: Elizabeth Wordsworth Junior Research Fellow, St. Hugh's College, Oxford, 1984–87; British Academy postdoctoral fellow, University of Glasgow, 1987–89. Lecturer, 1989–95, and since 1995 professor of modern Scottish literature, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife. Awards: Eric Gregory award, 1988; Poetry Book Society Recommendation, 1990, for A Scottish Assembly, 1992, for Talkies, 1996, for Masculinity; New Generation Poet, UK Arts Council, 1992; Scottish Arts Council Book award, 1994, for Identifying Poets, 1999, for Spirit Machines. Fellow, Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1999, and the English Association, 1999. Agent: David Godwin, 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG, England. Address: School of English, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife, KY16 9AL, Scotland.
Publications
Poetry
A Scottish Assembly. London, Chatto and Windus, 1990.
Sharawaggi: Poems in Scots, with W.N. Herbert. Edinburgh, Polygon, 1990.
Talkies. London, Chatto and Windus, 1992.
Masculinity. London, Cape, 1996.
Spirit Machines. London, Cape, 1999.
Other
The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987.
Devolving English Literature. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992.
Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth-Century Poetry. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1993.
Literature in Twentieth-Century Scotland: A Select Bibliography. London, British Council, 1995.
Editor, Other Tongues: Young Scottish Poets in English, Scots and Gaelic. St. Andrews, University of St. Andrews Press, 1990.
Editor, About Edwin Morgan. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1990.
Editor, The Arts of Alasdair Gray. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1991.
Editor, Reading Douglas Dunn. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1992.
Editor, Liz Lochhead's Voices. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1993.
Editor, Talking Verse. St. Andrews, University of St. Andrews, 1995.
Editor, Robert Burns and Cultural Authority. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, and Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1997.
Editor, Launch-site for English Studies. St. Andrews, Verse, 1997.
Editor, The Scottish Invention of English Literature. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Editor, The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945. Hammondsworth, Penguin, 1998.
Editor, The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. Hammondsworth, Penguin, 2000.
Editor, Scottish Religious Poems. Edinburgh, St. Andrews Press, 2000.
*Manuscript Collection: St. Andrews University Library, St. Andrews, Fife.
Critical Studies: By Anthony Woodward, in Review of English Studies, February 1990; review of 'Devolving English Literature' by Michael Baron, in English, 42(172), spring 1993, and by Fiona Stafford, in Review of English Studies, 46(181), February 1995; in Poetry Review, 84(1), spring 1994.
* * *Sometimes obliquely, often with energizing directness, Robert Crawford's poetry addresses Scotland, its past, present, and future. In the title poem of A Scottish Assembly the poet describes not being able to say "why I came back here to choose my union/On the side of the ayes, remaining a part//Of this diverse assembly—Benbecula, Glasgow, Bow of Fife— /Voting with my feet, and this hand." The phrase "this hand" is an emphatic but controlled gesture and shows Crawford to be a poet with a sense of a mission—to affirm the worth and potential of Scotland's "democratic intellect" ("Scotland"). The deft allusion to "this warm scribe my hand" in Keats's The Fall of Hyperion reveals Crawford's ability to make the English literary tradition serve his own ends. But the words "to choose my union/On the side of the ayes" are not without a hint of the voulu, despite the poem's disinclination to provide "rhyme or reason." There are moments when Crawford's identification between Scotland and some techno-poststructuralist utopia seem willed.
The main virtues of Crawford's work are its passages of surreal or satiric inventiveness (though these can pall), its heterogeneous mix of dictions, its fascination with what language reveals or betrays about a culture, and its valuable note of democratic celebration. A good example of the last quality is "Rain." In this poem the pressure to affirm a collective sense of identity challenges the mood of "solitude, and me/Remembering again that I shall die" in Edward Thomas's famous poem of the same title. The weaknesses of Crawford's work are its rhythmic prosiness (which is not deny momentum and rhetorical drive to his poems), its lack of formal variety, and its unsure touch when it enters the subjective realm. Crawford is a poet of gusto rather than nuance; his sentence shapes are declarative rather than exploratory. He always animates his subject, but he moves his reader less frequently. The end of "A Saying," one of the better personal poems in A Scottish Assembly, displays Crawford's interest in the local, in a person's culturally shaped "voiceprint." In its coy allusion to a well-known pop song, however, it ducks the emotional challenge it sets itself: "Through the machine I hear your Glasgow accent,/Your voiceprint. I just called, to say." In fact, Crawford is, glimmeringly more affecting in his contributions to Sharawaggi: Poems in Scots, a 1990 volume he wrote with W.N. Herbert. Little of his work in English has the force, in context, of these lines from the close of "Allerish": "Menkit, menkit, menkit, menkit, menkit!//An noo thi twa o us, schedded" ("Joined, joined, joined, joined, joined!//And now the two of us, parted" in Crawford's translation). He is capable, however, of a quiet dignity in his more public work, in "Nec Tamen Consumebatur" shifting laterally and, in the end, powerfully between respect for nationalist pride and political compassion for "small peoples." The poem concludes with lines that use well the pauses and weightings allowed by Crawford's favored two-line stanza:
When you spoke about poems in Vietnamese
I heard behind the pride in your voice
Like a ceilidh in an unexpected place
The burning violins of small peoples.
Talkies, Crawford's second full collection in English, goes full pelt in pursuit of the "new voice" that, in "Radio Scottish Democracy," "starts to come unjammed//Against a rout of white-noise, Floddens,/Cullodens, nostalgias that rhyme." The suspicion of hackneyed "nostalgias" does much to make Crawford's own poetic nationalism worthwhile. The volume mixes generalization with illustrative detail and at its best moves easily between the two. "WS," like other poems by Crawford, concerns itself with the writer's duty to attend to "famous non-celebrities, characters not in Smollett,/Sources never to be revealed//Without whom you could neither speak nor listen." Here the playful phrasing just about keeps at bay the danger of self-importance. Crawford's is a significant poetic task whose difficulties are suggested by the end of "Next Move," where he is "aware each step I took down the street/How much the next move would cost me."
The next move after Talkies was in the direction of a more personal poetry. In Masculinity, organized in the form of four loosely thematic sections, Crawford concentrates on domestic themes from a perspective shaped by gender politics as well as by an abiding concern with Scottish culture. As he takes snapshots of marriage and fatherhood, Crawford finds himself, with an often subtly managed balance, suggesting that he has experienced life as a series of stereotypes even when he wishes to show himself undoing stereotypes. The beginning of "Gym"—"Here they are again: men who are ill-at-ease/In rooms without wallbars or white lines painted on the floor"—plays with the fact that here, indeed, they are again crude representations of men. The poem finally works its way to a point where it can reinvest the hackneyed phrase "like a man" with meaning. Elsewhere the volume manages changes of tone and attitude with sensitivity and skill. "Winter" describes attending an adoption meeting in a way that shows off Crawford's new ability to blend statement with understatement. Here, as elsewhere, there is much to admire in his use of line breaks, rephrasings ("I couldn't really tell/Just what I wanted. I wanted too much") and deadpan detail (the couples wanting to adopt babies sit "in a semi-circle on bright scatter-cushions").
For all its many virtues Masculinity represents a certain curtailing, on Crawford's part, of ambition, both thematically and linguistically. There is no shortage of ambition in Spirit Machines, perhaps his finest achievement to date. The volume combines the personal and cultural emphases apparent in his previous collection with a goingfor-broke verbal excitement in the long poem "Impossibility," a fantasia on the life of Margaret Oliphant. Almost too programmatically, "The Result" refers at once to relief at good personal and political news. But it is telling that the poem is faced by "The Balance," a wry piece that speaks of how bank tellers would work on "if one thing in the balance for the day/Did not work out exactly," and the collection is vividly aware of things not working out. Thus, in "Bereavement" Crawford elegizes with stoical acceptance: "I walk the same roads far ahead of you,/So slowly, but you never catch me up." If, like his speaker in "Impossibility," Crawford might say, "I am a pearl and Scotland is a pearl," he never loses sight of the necessary grit that pearls require.
—Michael O'Neill