Andrew Neilson reviews The Tip of My Tongue by Robert Crawford (Jonathan Cape, £8)
Since his last collection of poems, Robert Crawford has been busy as an editor, publishing The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 with Simon Armitage and The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse with Mick Imlah. In Scotland, he has consolidated his position as the country's leading critic and become Head of the School of English at St. Andrew's University. He has, in fact, made St Andrew's a credible rival to Oxbridge as a centre of literary studies. On the poetic front, however, Crawford has been relatively inconspicuous compared to some of his contemporaries - save for the pages of the London Review of Books where his poems appear with a near-alarming frequency.
The Tip of My Tongue is a modest collection and gives the impression of a poet becalmed in temperate waters. There's nothing wildly exciting here, but then again the Good Ship Crawford is not sinking before our eyes. The tropical sun is shining through a pleasant veil of cloud. Indeed, The Tip of My Tongue is a more international book than its predecessors. At one point Crawford looks benevolently from the shores of Scotland and declares in Planetist:
But I'm a planetist as well,
Singing your praises, honoured speck,
Stung with sleepless inspiration
When even the wind has emphysema,
Roads, keep right on to the end of yourselves,
Islands, keep your heads above water.
One of the most humorous poems here is Acceptance Speech where the name-checks range across geography from "I want to thank each bead of water / In Lake Baikal and polar Lake Vostok" at the beginning to "Transhumant stars, each reminiscent / Of everywhere in particular" by the end. In between, Crawford makes a characteristically dry confession: "As a Scot, I know I owe a debt / To rain". But rain features infrequently in this collection of lyrics.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the poems opening The Tip of My Tongue. In this series of love poems to his wife, the reader is struck by the change in tone from the previous collection Spirit Machines which was haunted by the death of Crawford's father. That volume concluded with Alford, a fine elegy that co-opted some words from the Apostles at its close:
En te oikia tou Patros mou monai pollai eisin:
In my Father's house are many mansions:
If it were not so, I would have told you.
There is a gratifying sense of Crawford following on from this in his new collection, where the title of the opening poem, Fiat Lux, brings with it ideas of re-birth and enlightenment. The poem ends with the biblical cadence - "As has been said before, let there be light" - as indeed does the love lyric Conjugation: "Launching us, conjugating each haugh, / Oxter, pinkie and lobeless lug / As it will be in the beginning." Faith again figures at the close of a poem dedicated to his wife, Pilgrim:
A soul, like the signal from a mobile phone,
Heads south where muscadine light
Slurs mile-long midsummer breakers,
And sings out, blithe, by a kirk whose bellrope
Hangs, a frayed leash that's attached to the whole of the sky.
Familiar Crawford strategies are present and correct here - the religious concerns, the oblique couplets, the choice words ("muscadine", a departure from the fragments of Scots commonly deployed) and a fascination with finding the lyrical in technology.
At times the reliance on the familiar can be frustrating and it would be nice to see Crawford branch out a little more as a writer. Poems with titles such as Double Helix and Windfarming seem under-worked and the selection of subject matter unconvincing. There is a sense that occasionally his verse is merely satisfying the odd lyrical impulse in-between bouts of academic research, and that his full attention is often elsewhere. He has found some new inspiration in translating the Latin poems of Arthur Johnston, a Scottish poet of the
Renaissance. The Auld Enemy meanwhile is an excellent satire on Scottish self-pity and our delusional tendencies. It is the sheer spirited nature of his best lyrics that wins the day in the end, a sense of unexpected plenitude typified by Ferrari:
I knew, stroking your breasts beneath your blouse,
Both being and nothingness. We kissed like a cashless king
And queen who've just splashed out and bought
A Ferrari for the first day of spring.
In The Tip of My Tongue Crawford renews his vows to poetry, and the happy couple have a long way to go yet.
The Tip of My Tongue is a modest collection and gives the impression of a poet becalmed in temperate waters. There's nothing wildly exciting here, but then again the Good Ship Crawford is not sinking before our eyes. The tropical sun is shining through a pleasant veil of cloud. Indeed, The Tip of My Tongue is a more international book than its predecessors. At one point Crawford looks benevolently from the shores of Scotland and declares in Planetist:
But I'm a planetist as well,
Singing your praises, honoured speck,
Stung with sleepless inspiration
When even the wind has emphysema,
Roads, keep right on to the end of yourselves,
Islands, keep your heads above water.
One of the most humorous poems here is Acceptance Speech where the name-checks range across geography from "I want to thank each bead of water / In Lake Baikal and polar Lake Vostok" at the beginning to "Transhumant stars, each reminiscent / Of everywhere in particular" by the end. In between, Crawford makes a characteristically dry confession: "As a Scot, I know I owe a debt / To rain". But rain features infrequently in this collection of lyrics.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the poems opening The Tip of My Tongue. In this series of love poems to his wife, the reader is struck by the change in tone from the previous collection Spirit Machines which was haunted by the death of Crawford's father. That volume concluded with Alford, a fine elegy that co-opted some words from the Apostles at its close:
En te oikia tou Patros mou monai pollai eisin:
In my Father's house are many mansions:
If it were not so, I would have told you.
There is a gratifying sense of Crawford following on from this in his new collection, where the title of the opening poem, Fiat Lux, brings with it ideas of re-birth and enlightenment. The poem ends with the biblical cadence - "As has been said before, let there be light" - as indeed does the love lyric Conjugation: "Launching us, conjugating each haugh, / Oxter, pinkie and lobeless lug / As it will be in the beginning." Faith again figures at the close of a poem dedicated to his wife, Pilgrim:
A soul, like the signal from a mobile phone,
Heads south where muscadine light
Slurs mile-long midsummer breakers,
And sings out, blithe, by a kirk whose bellrope
Hangs, a frayed leash that's attached to the whole of the sky.
Familiar Crawford strategies are present and correct here - the religious concerns, the oblique couplets, the choice words ("muscadine", a departure from the fragments of Scots commonly deployed) and a fascination with finding the lyrical in technology.
At times the reliance on the familiar can be frustrating and it would be nice to see Crawford branch out a little more as a writer. Poems with titles such as Double Helix and Windfarming seem under-worked and the selection of subject matter unconvincing. There is a sense that occasionally his verse is merely satisfying the odd lyrical impulse in-between bouts of academic research, and that his full attention is often elsewhere. He has found some new inspiration in translating the Latin poems of Arthur Johnston, a Scottish poet of the
Renaissance. The Auld Enemy meanwhile is an excellent satire on Scottish self-pity and our delusional tendencies. It is the sheer spirited nature of his best lyrics that wins the day in the end, a sense of unexpected plenitude typified by Ferrari:
I knew, stroking your breasts beneath your blouse,
Both being and nothingness. We kissed like a cashless king
And queen who've just splashed out and bought
A Ferrari for the first day of spring.
In The Tip of My Tongue Crawford renews his vows to poetry, and the happy couple have a long way to go yet.
Page(s) 52-54
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