Robert Crawford's new collection is an exhilarating celebration of the world he lives in: his family, his fellow Scots, his country & his country's languages. Beginning with a group of moving, renewing love poems to his wife, the book builds into a polyphonic hymn to life in all its aspects.
There is a powerful sense of communion & connection in The Tip of My Tongue: while singing the Scottish part of the planet, Crawford also embraces the rhythms of the whole circumference
- from Perth, Scotl&, to Perth, Australia
- catching 'how Kincardineshire's sky's/ Transvaalish, Budapesty, Santa Barbaran, / Zurich on a perfect day'.
These are poems that are convincingly earthed in the land & the language yet unafraid of spiritual, even religious notes; richly lyrical & passionate yet shot through with a humour & a vitality that is utterly engaging. As Liam Mc Ilvanney wrote in the Sunday Herald, 'for intellectual range, emotional depth, & lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets'.