Jane Yeh reviews Selected Poems by Robert Crawford

Is it possible to be professionally Scottish? If so, then Robert Crawford is. Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at St Andrews, Crawford has compiled four anthologies of Scottish verse, as well as writing or editing numerous volumes of criticism on Scottish literature. In his own poetry, over the course of six collections (including one co-authored with WN Herbert), he has insistently staked out his terrain as being that of all things Scottish -- from the country's cities and landscapes to its people, past and present. "Scotland in the 1890s", "The Scottish National Cushion Survey", "Radio Scottish Democracy" and "Scotch Broth" are just a few of his typically nation-centric poem titles. Even more heavily featured are specific place names, whether as titles ("Cambuslang", "Alford", "Arbuthnott", etc.) or within the poems themselves, forming an endless litany. Crawford's will to name leaves almost nothing untouched -- woods aren't simply woods, they're "Glen Convinth woods"; a road is "the Arbroath road"; a beach is "the Arisaig beach". For a writer, place names sometimes resonate with personal significance, or are used to add an air of realism; they may be pleasing to the ear as sheer sounds. But with Crawford it's hard not to interpret his fetish for naming as a way of proclaiming his poetry's über-Scottishness, as if being Scottish were an end in itself.

Leaving this aside, what's appealing about Crawford is the musicality of his language, the surety of his lines and use of enjambement, all abundantly on display in his new Selected Poems. The pieces included here from his first collection, A Scottish Assembly (1990), still feel fresh and energetic, the work of a young writer in the best sense -- inventive, varied, alive with the possibilities inherent in the act of putting words together. In "Photonics", Crawford cleverly describes sex (and marriage) in terms of science, as a kind of "new technology, a system that weds / Lasers", or lovers, to each other. Playfully deploying technical jargon ("conjugate-phasing"), he extends the conceit through the poem to its celebratory conclusion: "We meet as clearly as two beams . . . / Bonded at the centre, having each / Come through all the R&D to run on light". Compared to such modern Metaphysical wit, the rest of the love poems in Selected Poems seem bland and banal.

Crawford is nearly as well known for mentioning technology in his poetry as for mentioning his Scottish identity; both concerns come together in the trademark poem "Scotland" (which boldly is the second of two poems called "Scotland", printed on facing pages in A Scottish Assembly). In it, Crawford uses a series of computer metaphors -- "superlattices", "Optoelectronics", "circuitboard" -- to portray his tiny country as a semiconductor-sized "chip of a nation". But where "Scotland" sounds novel and inspired, in the later poems Crawford's interest in technology seems increasingly gimmicky, like a bid at up-to-the-minute relevance. Nanomachines, Apple Macs and virtual reality are cited, and "e-mails graze . . . villages" on their travels; a shepherd's croft in the Hebrides has a satellite dish. The idea that technology pervades modern life, even in rural areas, or that the Internet connects people from the farthest corners of the globe, or that electronic devices can convert the tangible world into disembodied, digital information (see "Deincarnation", from 1999's Spirit Machines), is hardly insightful.

Some of Crawford's strongest writing, in fact, dwells on older objects, like the wrought-iron sewing machine with which his mother lovingly made him schoolclothes. Memories of the past (or "hard nostalgia") form a persistent strand in Crawford's work. The poem "Boy", from Talkies (1992), offers an elegantly odd take on adolescence -- "Everybody's gone now. I'm just thirteen. / I understand I don't understand it" -- while a later piece, "Us", movingly reconstructs the author's childhood home by listing its contents in all their shabby, individual detail. At his best, Crawford can also be quirkily comical, as in "The Numties", a nonsensical description of an imaginary decade, or "MC", a cryptically terse biography of a fictional military gent ("Old age, psoriasis: put feet in poly bags"). It's these flashes of weirdness, not his references to the Internet, that make Crawford's poetry seem truly contemporary.

 

Selected Poems (Jonathan Cape, £12.00)

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