Old World

Traversing the globe, Old World is a generous, playful poetry collection about the issues facing our planet today, from a major Scots poet and biographer of T.S. Eliot

'For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed' Sunday Herald

'Ecological poetry of great intelligence and sensitivity' Guardian

Mixing lyricism, play, and vulnerability, Old World explores the issues facing our planet in the twenty-first century, from European war to climate change and AI. From riddles and haikus to verse influenced by both Western and Eastern cultures, Crawford arrives at a sense of sacredness of life on earth.

These poems speak both of the menaced plenitude of living beings, and of frailties associated with growing old. Part of the book is given over to voices of creatures from the non-human world, part to human voices, but boundaries between these categories become mischievously and disconcertingly unstable.

Writing out of older Scottish traditions that are intellectually deft and linguistically complex, Robert Crawford stands as a contemporary master of poetry.

‘A poet of great importance… fluent, inventive, funny, crackling with intellectual energy, and at the very heart of our own time’ Scotsman

'In his hands, all modern life can be poetry’ Herald