The Tip of My Tongue

Robert Crawford’s new collection is an exhilarating celebration of the world he lives in: his family, his fellow Scots, his country and 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 and 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, Scotland, 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 and the language yet unafraid of spiritual, even religious notes; richly lyrical and passionate yet shot through with a humour and a vitality that is utterly engaging. As Liam McIlvanney wrote in the Sunday Herald, ‘for intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets’.

Reviews of The Tip of My Tongue

"For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets." — Liam McIlvanney Sunday Herald