Most Popular Books by Robert Crawford

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.

To make a testament is to attempt to pass on what matters most. In his seventh full-length collection of poems Robert Crawford writes of love, loss, belief, and commitment. Whether in intimate erotic lyrics or in a sustained engagement with the politics of Scottish independence he writes with passion, wit, and assurance about struggles to pass on values and treasures. The book opens with a sequence of love poems, and closes with ‘Testament’, a startlingly fresh gathering of deftly rhymed paraphrases based on the New Testament. Whether making versions of Cavafy or elegising fellow poet Mick Imlah, or writing how a father hands on a piece of marble to his son, Robert Crawford shows in Testament how poetry can communicate from generation to generation aspects of what makes us most vulnerably and engagingly human.

Textual Non Sense is mischievous, minimalist, and revolutionary: a short fuse intended to spark a fundamental re-thinking of how we engage with notions of canon. Classic texts are mangled, quotes are mis-attributed, and great authors are misidentified as Robert Crawford brings literature and chaos theory together in a romance made on Tinder. William Shakespeare of the School of Literature and Bookmaking introduces a survey of writers'' struggles. John Buchan provides his guide to writing a best-seller (blotting paper plays a key role). Professor Mike Foucault employs Big Data to investigate the new discipline, ‘Creaticism'', or ''Critive Writing.'' Humour and literary criticism tend to go together like apples and arsenic. Textual Non Sense argues that humour is an essential corrective--a missing ingredient to a cure for the arthritis and calcification of academic literary criticism. "Absolutely the most important book of our era." -- Virginia Wool "I just can’t wait for the American edition!" -- Emily Dickinson Beyond Criticism Editions is the reincarnation of the Beyond Criticism book series, originally published by Bloomsbury and now part of Boiler House Press'' own experiments with the radical new forms that literary criticism might take in the 21st century.

Traversing the globe, Old World is a generous, playful collection about the issues facing our planet today, from a major Scots poet and biographer of T.S. Eliot ''For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed'' Sunday Herald Mixing lyricism, play, and vulnerability, Old World explores the issues facing our planet in the twenty-first century, from European war to climate change and AI. From riddles and haikus to verse influenced by both Western and Eastern cultures, Crawford arrives at a sense of sacredness of life on earth. These poems speak both of the menaced plenitude of living beings, and of frailties associated with growing old. Part of the book is given over to voices of creatures from the non-human world, part to human voices, but boundaries between these categories become mischievously and disconcertingly unstable. ‘A poet of great importance... fluent, inventive, funny, crackling with intellectual energy, and at the very heart of our own time’ Scotsman ''In his hands, all modern life can be poetry’ Herald

Here is a distillation of the best work from one of Scotland s leading contemporary poets, taken from his first six collections, including Spirit Machines and The Tip of My Tongue."

This brand new anthology is comprised of creative prose, non-fiction and poetry that ranges from St. Columba to the present day, all linked by the isle of Iona. Featuring specially commissioned work by Meaghan Delahunt, Jennie Erdal, Sara Lodge, Victoria Mackenzie, Candia McWilliam, Ruth Thomas, and Alice Thompson this wonderful collection will have broad historical and contemporary appeal. The Book of Iona is a celebration of one of Scotland''s most beautiful islands and follows on from the success of The Book of St. Andrews (Polygon, 2007).

In a work of spectacular imagination and remarkable synthesis, poet Robert Crawford celebrates St Andrews, the first town in the world to have its people, buildings and natural environment thoroughly documented through photography. The Beginning and the End of the World tells the stories of several pioneering Scottish photographers, linking their work to one of the nineteenth century''s most scandalous and hotly debated publications. Here is the extraordinary intellectual life of an eccentric society rich in apocalyptically-minded Victorian inventors and authors whose work has had an international impact. The protagonists include a very quarrelsome professor, a cello-playing ex-military golfer, a notorious scientist, a married couple coping with mental breakdown and a physician obsessed with sewage. In paying full attention to these people''s inter-relationship, implicitly and explicitly this book suggests that their lasting legacies may have a bearing on our own arguments about environmental sustainability and the possibility of largescale extinction.

Addressed to all readers of poetry, this is a wide-ranging book about the poet''s role throughout the last three centuries. It argues that a conception of the poets as both primitive and sophisticated emerged in the 1750s. Encouraged by the classroom when English literary works began to be studied in universities, this view continues to shape our own attitudes towards verse. Whether considering Ossian and the Romantics, Victorian scholar-gipsies, Modernist poetries of knowledge, or contemporary poetry in Britian, Ireland, and America, The Modern Poet shows how many successive generations of poets have needed to collaborate and to battle with academia.

Drawing on a unique study of Australian advertising agencies at the dawn of the digital era, this book provides a hitherto unexplored study of the advertising industry at a point of its disruption. By exploring the dynamic interaction between this established but complacent industry, and a radically new communication medium, this book reveals how advertising agencies were forced to change fundamentally, yet as an industry helped shape the digital economy, and the platforms that dominate it. Based on contemporary reports, company archives, personal archives, and over 50 interviews with past and current advertising practitioners across the range of agency departments, this unique historical narrative reveals how power shifts between agencies, advertisers, and other media platforms forged the current models of advertiser-funded digital media. For scholars of marketing, media, communication, and contemporary history, this is an illuminating perspective on the early impact of the digital revolution and its relevance to the media landscape today.

One of Scotland’s most celebrated poets, Robert Crawford has long been a passionate and articulate ambassador for his country and its culture, its people and its landscape. The Scottish Ambassador fuses individual and communal voices in poems that resonate far beyond their points of origin. Engaging with Zoroastrian, Chinese and Greek as well as with Scottish antecedents, Crawford’s poems have an arresting range and a lyrical energy. He negotiates with intensity and wit between a deep sense of human universals and a heartfelt fidelity to individual places. Ranging from Jerusalem to Iona, New York City to Shetland, this is a collection of international range that continually zeroes in on the particular – and the particularly Scottish. At the book’s centre is a series of intimate, funny, eloquent portraits of cities which are at once remarkable public poems and outpourings of love.

These continue to nourish the verse of sophisticated post-British ''barbarian'' poets such as Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn, Les Murray and Derek Walcott. More than that, they are bound up with the contemporary literature and politics of Britain after devolution."--BOOK JACKET.

A mere forty miles apart, these cities have enjoyed a rivalry since wistful Edinburgh lost parliamentary sovereignty and defiant Glasgow came into its industrial promise. Crawford brings them to life between the covers of one book, in a tale that mixes novelty and familiarity, as Scotland’s cultural capital and largest commercial city do.

A free-fall oceanographic instrument has been used to measure vertical microstructure scale gradients of horizontal velocity, temperature and electrical conductivity. The velocity gradients, or shears, were measured at scales between 3 and 40 cm by an airfoil shear probe whose specifications and calibration procedure are discussed. Data collected in the equatorial Atlantic in July 1974 indicated a consistent pattern of turbulence near the velocity core of the Atlantic Equatorial Undercurrent. (The velocity core is the region of maximum speed).

This report on the International Trade Centre (ITC) World Export Development Forum on Consumers, Ethics and Environment (October 2008), reflects on what ethical trade means, the growth in the global fair trade and ethical markets, how entrepreneurs in developing countries can break into these markets, and what trade support institutions and governments should be doing to help ethical traders. It considers the bottom line for every topic discussed: how to use ethical trade as a tool to raise standards of living for everyone involved.

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No detailed description available for "Liz Lochhead''s Voices".

A study that examines the way 20th-century poets identify themselves with particular territories, constructing and reconstructing territorial identities. From America to Australia, and from Scotland and England to the Caribbean, it looks in detail at the poetry of six international poets--Robert Frost, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Les Murray, John Ashbery, and Frank Kuppner--as well as discussing th Scots work of Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, and Edwin Morgan, and the English-language work of Peter Reading, Judith Wright, and Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott. Distributed by Columbia U. Press. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"This book introduces business historians to oral history methodologies and approaches. Using four distinct oral history case studies to explore ideas of disruption and continuity in business history over the second half of the twentieth century, Robert Crawford and Matthew Bailey demonstrate how critical engagement with oral history approaches serves to enhance and enliven business history as well as its relationship with other historical fields. The focus on disruption is used to encompass a broad set of processes such as technological change, the impact of external forces, informal business networks, social constructions of gender, knowledge transfer, firm adaptability and cultural change. The use of oral histories to interpret responses to disruption in the past, and to explore the features characterising business continuity, provides an opportunity to consider the human dimensions, subjective experiences and personal insights of workplace, firm and industry change. It also sheds light on the ways that people and firms respond to disruptive forces through innovation and adaptation - both successfully and unsuccessfully. This succinct and accessible account is essential reading for business historians with little experience in using oral history, as well as those looking to gain deeper insights from their oral history data"--