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Ends and Beginnings

Iain Crichton Smith

Cover Picture of Ends and Beginnings
10% off
Categories: 20th Century, Scottish
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (160 pages)
(Pub. Oct 1994)
9781857540932
£9.95 £8.96
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  • No, it's not a question of waiting for a voice from the sky as in
         ancient days,
    or sitting at a desk like Virgil while the empire prospered around
         him.

    There is no such voice, objective and distant and impartial,
    There are no Muses dressed in imperial blue.

    from 'No Muses'

    Ends and Beginnings is Iain Crichton Smith's most ambitious collection for years. It begins in elegy, with the exiles and deaths about which he writes so memorably, and progresses through place, history and positive change.

    After a trip to the Golan Heights, he conceived a major poem on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, using an unaccustomed Biblical idiom. He considers the isolated people of his native Lewis, and those isolated in a wider culture-scholars, writers, lovers, the old-whose need for communion is thwarted by estranging disciplines or by the depredations of history.

    Iain Crichton Smith's Collected Poems (1992) received the Saltire Prize, one of Scotland's highest literary accolades. Douglas Dunn wrote in The Times Literary Supplement of `that purity, that touch of originality, which marks poetry at the limits of intuition and imagining.' Robert Nye in The Times declared of the Collected Poems: `Crichton Smith's net is quite wide, but its meshes are splendidly small, and he is always catching more than he probably intended.'
    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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