Full Volume

Description

Listening, love, and a quickened awareness of vulnerability enrich the Scottish poet Robert Crawford's sixth collection of poems. Holding in balance the ecological and the technological, ancient and modern, Full Volume sings languages and cultures, people and habitats burgeoning on the brink of extinction. From revved-up battle-cry to nervous whisper, these lyrical poems praise intricate abundance. Assured in its rhymes and cadences, Full Volume is often attentive to poetry in other tongues, not least Gaelic. As their tones and forms shift from the spiritual to the wry, from haiku to brosnachadh, the poems' resonance and music build into a sustained sounding of what it means to live, love, and listen in a world where 'Nothing is ever single'.

Robert Crawford's seventh collection of poems, Testament, was published by Cape in 2014. His first book was on T. S. Eliot, and his other prose books include The Modern Poet (2001) and an award-winning biography of Robert Burns, The Bard (Cape, 2009). He is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

A poet of great importance... fluent, inventive, funny, crackling with intellectual energy and at the very heart of our own time -- Iain Crichton Smith * Scotsman * Robert Crawford is one of the most distinctive of these new virtuosi. A gifted critic as well as a poet, he relishes the language game, but also keeps a grasp on more emotionally challenging matters -- Carol Rumens * Independent * Intelligent, witty, funny... These fine, acute poems, full of tight creases of meaning and sharp twists of language, show us better than most new fiction what is being lost and found every day in contemporary Scotland -- James Wood * Guardian * One of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Scottish literature -- Keith Bruce * Herald *