Old World

Robert Crawford

$29.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

QTY:

English

Jonathan Cape Ltd
30 September 2025

Poetry; Poetry by individual poets; Fiction: special features

Traversing the globe, Old World is a generous, playful collection from a major Scots poet and biographer of T.S. Eliot

Traversing the globe, Old World is a generous, playful poetry 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.

Writing out of older Scottish traditions that are intellectually deft and linguistically complex, Robert Crawford stands as a contemporary master of poetry.

'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

By: Robert Crawford
Imprint: Jonathan Cape Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 197mm, Width: 131mm, Spine: 9mm
Weight: 114g
ISBN: 9781787334564
ISBN 10: 1787334562
Pages: 96
Publication Date: 30 September 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Robert Crawford is a poet, biographer, critic and literary historian who has published eight full collections of poetry and many prose books, including two major biographies of T.S. Eliot- Young Eliot and Eliot After The Waste Land. Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, he is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. His poetry has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and he has won two Scottish Arts Council Book Awards as well as the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.

Reviews for Old World

Crawford knows when to be piano and when to ring out the forte... This is an exceptionally fine collection, and a model for how to nuance the stylistic shifts * Scotsman, praise for THE SCOTTISH AMBASSADOR * A thorough, solid sequel to Crawford's much-praised Young Eliot... This biography is going to play a large part in any future assessment of Eliot * Spectator, praise for ELIOT AFTER THE WASTE LAND * For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets -- Liam McIlvanney * Sunday Herald *