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New Collected Poems

Iain Crichton Smith

Edited by Matt McGuire

New Collected Poems by Iain Crichton Smith
10% off eBook (EPUB)
Categories: 20th Century, Scottish
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Aug 2011)
9781847778277
£18.95 £17.05
Paperback (500 pages)
(Pub. Jan 2011)
9781857549607
Out of Stock
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  • It is the island that goes away, not we who leave it.
    Like an unbearable thought it sinks beyond
    assiduous reasoning light and wringing hands,
    or, as a flower roots deep into the ground,
    it works its darkness into the gay winds
    that blow about us in a later spirit.

                                         from ‘The Departing Island’
    Iain Crichton Smith's Collected Poems was awarded the Saltire Prize when it was published in 1992. This completely revised and enlarged edition includes seventy additional poems, mostly from the four books the poet published in the 1990s: Ends and Beginnings (1994), The Human Face (1996), The Leaf and The Marble (1998) and A Country for Old Men and My Canadian Uncle (2000), together with extracts from his 1971 translation of Sorley Maclean's epic Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile (Poems to Eimhir, 1943), a founding moment of modern Gaelic poetry.

    The new introduction by Matthew McGuire of the Department of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow, illuminates the range of Crichton Smith's achievement as a poet of Scotland and Europe, rooted in local tradition and, in Edwin Morgan's words, ‘open to the whole intellectual world’.

    cover image: Marion MacPhee, Sound of Shiant (monotype, 2002). Copyright © Marion MacPhee www.marionmacphee.co.uk.



    Iain Crichton Smith
    Iain Crichton Smith was born in Glasgow in 1928, but his father died of TB before he could know him, and his fiercely Calvinist mother took him back to her native Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He grew up with his two brothers in the village of Bayble, where ... read more
    Praise for Iain Crichton Smith 'Crichton Smith's work abounds in variety'

    David Hackbridge Johnson, The High Window

    'The wealth of the poems it contains is extraordinary'

    Poetry Salzburg 

     'Over the years [his] poetry has increased in strangeness and beauty. He is a poet of his own discontents, but one who has submitted his unrest to the demands of the imagination.'
    Times Literary Supplement
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