Robert Crawford Quotes
born 1959 Scotland
Robert Crawford FRSE FBA (born 1959) is a Scottish poet, scholar and critic. He is emeritus Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.
Random Robert Crawford quote
7 quotes
James Murray combs the dialect from his beard
And files slips for his massive Dictionary.
Thinking of Helensburgh, J. G. Frazer
Revises flayings and human sacrifice;
Abo of the Celtic Twilight, St Andrew Lang
Posts him a ten-page note on totemism
And a coloured fairy book.
Among circuitboard crowsteps
To be miniaturised is not small-minded.
To love you needs more details than the Book of Kells —
Your harbours, your photography, your democratic intellect
Still boundless, chip of a nation.
Semiconductor country, land crammed with intimate expanses,
Your cities are superlattices, heterojunctive
Graphed from the air, your cropmarked farmlands
Are epitaxies of tweed.
Throw all your stagey chandeliers in wheel-barrows and move them north
To celebrate my mother's sewing-machine
And her beneath an eighty-watt bulb, pedalling
Iambs on an antique metal footplate.
Ghetto-makars, tae the knackirs'
Wi aw yir schemes, yir smug dour dreams
O yir ain feet. Yi're beat
By yon new Scoatlan loupin tae yir street...
... Listen —
Not to dour centuries of trudging,
Marching, and taking orders;
Today I have heard the feet of my country
Breaking into a run.