The Tip Of My Tongue

The Tip Of My Tongue

Summary

Robert Crawford's new collection is an exhilarating celebration of the world he lives in: his family, his fellow Scots, his country and his country's languages. Beginning with a group of moving, renewing love poems to his wife, the book builds into a polyphonic hymn to life in all its aspects.

There is a powerful sense of communion and connection in The Tip of My Tongue: while singing the Scottish part of the planet, Crawford also embraces the rhythms of the whole circumference - from Perth, Scotland, to Perth, Australia - catching 'how Kincardineshire's sky's/Transvaalish, Budapesty, Santa Barbaran,/Zurich on a perfect day'.

These are poems that are convincingly earthed in the land and the language yet unafraid of spiritual, even religious notes; richly lyrical and passionate yet shot through with a humour and a vitality that is utterly engaging. As Liam McIlvanney wrote in the Sunday Herald, 'for intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets'.

Reviews

  • For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets.
    Liam McIlvanney, Sunday Herald

About the author

Robert Crawford

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.
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