New Collected Poems

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.

About the Author :
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 he spoke Gaelic, and not until he began school did English become necessary. He went to university in Aberdeen (it was the first time he had left the island) and after receiving his MA he joined the British Army Education Corps for his National Service. He then became a secondary school teacher in Clydebank, near Glasgow, and for twenty-two years at Oban High School. Much of his writing was done after work. His first book, The Long River (1955) was followed by The White Noon (1959), Thistles and Roses (1961), and the long poem, Deer on the High Hills (1962). Thereafter, collections in English or Gaelic appeared regularly, including several Selected editions, culminating in a Collected Poems in 1992 from Carcanet (Poetry Book Society Special Commendation) which was expanded and reissued as New Collected Poems in 2011.

Review :
'It is further confirmation of Crichton Smith's effervescent creativity, remorseless curiousity and ambivalence towards the place and culture in which he was brought up... Not only will this book help keep his flame alive, it is also a reminder of just how diverse and witty and wide-ranging a poet Crichton Smith could be and how different he was from contemporaries, such as MacDiarmid, MacCraig and Sorley Maclean, Edwin Morgan and Robert Garioch.' - Alan Taylor, The Glasgow Herald, 19th February 2011