Robert Crawford has said his Scottish upbringing and academic work have made him particularly aware of an eclectic strain in Scottish literature that goes back at least as far as the Enlightenment, if not the Reformation: a tradition of academic generalism and what he calls “democratic intellect” that is still current in Scottish universities. This often shows up in his own work, which demonstrates a Metaphysical keenness to reach for the language of technology and science in order to explore the human and spiritual. “I like the science that fuels and is fuelled by the dream-mind”, he says. “I love to think of poetry and science as kinds of discovery quickened by observation and imagination.” If poetry is to retain any relevance, it has to regard science as a legitimate subject. “Poetry will continue to be obsessed with sea and stars, love and death, but if it is not also alert to semiconductors and computers, wind farming and global warming, it will grow subtly untrue to the linguistic and cultural climate in which it is written.” If it ignores large areas of contemporary experience, it risks becoming “a ghetto concern”.
This cross-disciplinary mindset was apparent in Crawford’s first collection, A Scottish Assembly (1990). The book included a number of poems about Scottish scientists and even went so far as to imagine that Albert Einstein had been born a Scot: “When proof of Einstein’s Glaswegian birth / First hit the media everything else was dropped / Logie Baird, Dundee painters, David Hume – all / Got the big E”. But in “Windfarming”, first published in the TLS in 2003 and then in The Tip of My Tongue (2003), Crawford finds a gentler place for the turbines he describes by absorbing them into human history: they are harvesters, windmills, crucifixes, angels with beating wings, modern incarnations of the ancient pastoral instinct to provide and protect – “piloting the earth on its way”.
Windfarming
Flailing outstretched cirrus fields,
Sleek metals throw up their hands,
Gleaning, milling where there is no corn
In the agribusiness of air,
Totempoled into acceleration’s
Ultimate source and resource,
Propeller-driven crosses of the risen Christ,
Great ghosts of standing stones.
While everything is speeding up,
Overheating, hurtling away,
Good to stand still on this moonlit upland,
Canny, uncanny, with a choir of angels
Towering above us, beating their wings,
Piloting the earth on its way.
ROBERT CRAWFORD (2003)
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