It’s when he surfs his own imaginative Internet that Crawford achieves real

It’s when he surfs his own imaginative Internet that Crawford achieves real integration of mind and matter. “Impossibility,” a 60-stanza dramatic monologue spoken by the 19th-century author Margaret Oliphant, is replete with magical leaps. “Blearily rummaging the Internet” (Crawford’s favourite “spirit machine” is the computer), the writer-surfer enters the underworld to meet his late father via a bizarre kind of computer- game: “tanks manoeuvred round the hearth and range/ Smashing duck eggs, throwing up clouds of flour./ Fleeing the earth-floored kitchen, an ironing table/ Hirpled like girderwork from bombed Cologne/ Into the study where my Aunt Jean studied/ How not to be a skivvy all her life”.In this poem, “Alford”, as in others, the media of connection also separate: they divide son from father, the old employees from the young (“Time and Motion”), or spirit away the beloved landscape (“Deincarnation”) in dangerously seductive ways. Crawford’s pleasure in the sciences typifies a distinctly Scottish tradition; his predecessors include John Davidson, Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan.
But this poet’s pleasure is double-edged.

If you’re a bit of a classicist with nerdish tendencies, then better still. Check out “rhotacised”, “brecbennach”, “nanomachine”, “florilegium” and “difference engines”. Readers, however, should be prepared to contribute a taste for arcane words; a Scots dictionary will not go amiss. The Scottish writer Robert Crawford is one of the most distinctive of these new virtuosi. A gifted critic as well as poet, he relishes the language game, but also keeps a grasp on more emotionally challenging matters – notably, in this collection, the father-son relationship. Nevertheless, linguistic display is still prized by poets and critics, and the pensioned-off Martians have since been replaced by the bright young followers of Paul Muldoon at the centre of attention. POETRY IN Britain is, happily, a more diverse and open art than in Eliot’s day, or even in the early 1980s, when Craig Raine and friends delighted some readers and irritated others with a mock-Martian’s take on things.

But you do look, how can I put this, old.”That was the clincher Moi, old? So I put on a clean shirt for Sunday lunch Well, we did have company.. I’m with the Queen on this one.”It’s OK looking like a tramp when you’re young,” so my wife said, “but someone of 60, looking like you, well.. people will think you smell You don’t. It’s the basis of all fashion – wanting to feel good, combined with having people thinking you look good But what a drag, having to make that effort. And someone who is vain can’t say they don’t care…”But at the same time, I can’t be vain, if I go around looking the way I do?”That’s because you guy yourself, deliberately being scruffy just to annoy.”I got lost in the logic of that one.It is true that on the very few occasions I do make an effort, put on a suit and stuff, I can feel people thinking weh-hey, he looks smart People thinking you are smart does make you feel smart. I have far more important things to worry about, such as Dwight Yorke.

So what are you on about, woman?”Well,” she said, “when you’re going out, you say what do I like, expecting the answer to be `Terrific, you look great.’”What’s wrong with that? It would be nice if you said so, now and again, but it doesn’t worry me if you don’t.”You ask because you are vain. Mostly these last 20 years, I’ve bought jackets and coats at charity shops, when the old ones have totally fallen to pieces. One of the arguments for looking scruffy is that you can’t go into second-hand shops and haggle if you’re well dressed But basically, it’s because I don’t care about clothes. OK, it didn’t fit, but then so what? It was jolly warm.I have a tweed winter coat today they all hate, bought second hand in Camden Town Cost me pounds 10, which was a lot.