Book description
SPIRIT MACHINES, Robert Crawford's fourth collection, attends
imaginatively to the fusion of spiritual experience and the insistently
material world. In several of the poems, emotional and religious
insights merge lyrically with modern technologies of information. The
title sequence deals with bereavement and memorializes the poet's
father, who died in1997, while the serio-comical catechism of 'A
Life-Exam' arises from the experience of hospitalisation. The
imaginative, 360-line tour de force 'Impossibility' presents a swirling
underwater world imaging the heroic struggle of the nineteenth-century
writer and mother, Margaret Oliphant. While some of the poems
communicate a sense of hurt and loss, others are insuperably comic,
giving the collection an ambitious range and vitality. Throughout the
book, Robert Crawford's alert sense of Scotland provides a source and
sounding-board for poems -lyrics, ballads, verse narratives and prose
poems - that are finely nuanced, moving, and excitingly resourceful.
