The Scottish Ambassador

Cape Poetry Robert Crawford’s 16th collection has as its spine incantatory evocations of Scottish places. They somewhat resemble his translation of Gaelic war-song; a kind of hasty, breathless accumulation. His version of Glasgow, for example, is “All second-city edginess, fossil grove, puddled panache, / Operatic, fat, incessantly jumpy with static, / Gralloching yourself, tearing yourself apart, / To hit back through lesions or drooled ferro-concrete bridges”. Edinburgh meanwhile is “Knox-talk, broderie, Brodies, bestial vennels, / Drug deals done under too many bridges.” These quotes do not do justice to the sheer relentlessness of the verse, often deploying internal rhymes and half-rhymes to drive along the joyous pandemonium.

A whole collection in this style would not work, and it is testament to his skill in putting together a collection that Crawford knows when to be piano and when to ring out the forte. Smaller, more haikulike pieces intersperse the exuberance. Some of these are twinned translations, in Scots, from ancient Greek writers like Simonides and Sappho and classical Chinese writers such as Li Bai and Wang Wei. Others are almost whispers of poems. There is a pleasingly modest religiosity about some of these, a quiet sanctity: “Feel your wrists / Pulsing with worship”; or the entirety of “Home” – “The dark universe / Is full of candles, burning / For our safe return”. These remind me of the great Metaphysical Poets of the 17th century, such as Vaughan or Herbert, although more laconic and chiselled.

There is some riddling wit in all of this, especially in “Search Engine”, where Google is broken down into Go, the Chinese game, and ogle, where the programme is “oracle of all our porn”. This is an exceptionally fine collection, and a model for how to nuance the stylistic shifts. Too often I have read collections and thought “This poem is actually identical to the previous one.” Not so here.