Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Scottish poetry was, as Eliot once snickered, not up to much after the likes of Henryson and Dunbar, barring the not entirely helpful detour of Burns, and this remained the case until Hugh McDiarmid singlehandedly forged a way ahead at the beginning of the century. So Scots balms are taught at school, or should be, and so the tradition in Scotland remains hot in the moulding.

Robert Crawford, as a professor at St Andrews University, has helped to shape and maintain the emergent canon, and of late has been able to concentrate on a fine and age-old Scottish pursuit - beating the English at their own game (see Carlyle, Hume, Alex Ferguson) - in The Scottish Invention of English Literature and, to a lesser extent, in the recent anthology with Simon Armitage, The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945. While engaged on these grand plans, Crawford’s alter ego, tweedily charming in person, has been writing poetry, and Spirit Machines is his most recent product.

The collection is divided into five sections, two of these being long pieces - ‘A Life Exam’ and ‘Impossibility’. The former is a meditation resulting from a period of hospitalisation, and emphasises the importance of humour in Scottish writing. ‘Impossibility’ on the other hand, a long poem on the life of Margaret Oliphant - a Victorian novelist once memorably described as “the feminist Trollope” - is a little too worthy despite an inventive treatment. It is one of the few moments where Crawford ignites familiar suspicions about academics who write verse.

Most of the time Crawford avoids this, however, and nervily animated pieces such as the prose poem ‘Grim Reaper’ make their mark on the volume. In this, formulas are mixed to produce a ‘death and trains’ poem, with Death pictured as Lord Beeching, the man who rationalised the railways and here, in a Gothic clangour, Crawford’s ancestors. Significantly, in the only Scots language poem of the book - ‘LigLag’, from the title sequence of elegies memorialising his father - Crawford repeats an old trick of presenting us with a prose English translation, aptly glossed as ‘Sensation of Another Language’. Where previously Crawford may have been making a political and, yes, comic point, here the effect is entirely moving, a true estrangement regardless of your nationality.

If there is a primary mode in Spirit Machines, it involves short lyrics in blank couplets, issued forth from an area of cyberspace forever Caledonia, with an accretion of close observation and observed words. These do not so much culminate with, as slip in, a lyric utterance to close. By this I mean that it is not always clear where the closure stands to what has gone before.

‘Sobieski-Stuarts’ and ‘Deincarnation’ are particular examples of what I mean, ending respectively with “Underneath heavy evening cloud / The sun sets, a jabot of light” and “So close, the tangible spirited away / Cybered in a world of light”. In both cases the final spiritual/lyrical elevation is too dependent on one of those choice words and the natural (if ironic) weight of ‘light’ in a poem. To neologise a verb from ‘cyber’ is a particularly easy figure for Crawford, and at times in Spirit Machines it is frustrating to see such clearly worked pieces no so much strain as slouch towards the high note.

But I am carping somewhat. Crawford’s canniness saves the day, and the poems in the first and last sections of the book are largely successful. The elegies ‘Bereavement’ and ‘Relief’, through their unbroken simplicity, vie with richer pieces such as ‘Anstruther’ which crackles and swims in vibrant language.

The final poem of the book, ‘Alford’, is perhaps the best example of what Crawford is capable of, in that the dosing lines - as lyrical and spiritually informed as any here - succeed precisely bacuse the poem has prepared us for them. The end is not merely justified by postmodern phrasings and the urge to contemporise (hey, it may be “Teasing the rapt ear forever”, but it’s a ‘CD ROM’ ye ken), but also has the formal integrity of a conceit. When the expected lift approaches, once we have explored the web-site as an “old harked manse / Sash windows opening on many Scotlands” with memories of his father merging with this, even the most sceptical reader is prepared and chastened for what follows:

Manse rooms huddle, fill with shetland ponies,
London tubes. There is no here. Here goes.
En te oikia tou Patros mou monai pollai eisin:
In my Father’s house there are many mansions:
If it were not so, I would have told you.

The effect is rather like that found in Seamus Heaney’s poetry since Seeing Things, where a Romantic, Wordsworthian note is justified by a pared down, almost off-hand language, and other gestures to the provisional. That Crawford is prepared to try for this in his own way, even when not always succeeding, is a measure of his development as a poet.