Iain Crichton Smith

Selected Poems (Poetry Signatures)

The Complete English Short Stories, 1977-98

The Black Halo

Collected Poems

'Retrained, finely wrought ... Mr Crichton Smith shows us isolation, perplexity, loneliness, a combination of blindness and indifference' - New Statesman 'Mr Crichton Smith has an acute feeling for places and atmosphere. The wind-blown heaths, the grey skies, the black dwellings, the narrow lives, the poverty - are all vividly depicted ... one can linger over the sheer beauty of his phrases' - Observer The eviction of the crofters from their homes between 1792 and the 1850s was one of the cruellest episodes in Scotland's history. In this novel Iain Crichton Smith captures the impact of the Highland Clearances through the thoughts and memories of an old woman who has lived all her life within the narrow confines of her community. Alone and bewildered by the demands of the factor, Mrs Scott approaches the minister for help, only to have her faith shattered by his hypocrisy. She finds comfort, however, from a surprising source: Donald Macleod, an imaginative and self-educated man who has been ostracised by his neighbours, not least by Mrs Scott herself, on account of his atheism. Through him and through the circumstances forced upon her, the old woman achieves new strength.

Consider the Lilies

In his fifth collection for Carcanet, Crichton Smith's powers prove undiminished. In what is essentially an extended love poem to his wife, The Leaf and the Marble begins as a holiday in Italy, and is transformed into an exploration of the founding myths of classical Rome. With the legend of Aeneas and Dido playing a central role, the poems explore the violence and cruelty of Roman society and contrast this with the world of Nature. While Crichton Smith contends that Rome was founded on the denial of love, the poetry in this collection is a testament to the enduring and humane potential of that love.

The Leaf and the Marble

Collected poems first published in Great Britain in 1992 by Carcanet Press.

New Collected Poems

For an eleven-year-old boy, living with his widowed mother and younger brother in a remote seaside village on one of the Western Isles of Scotland, growing up has its difficulties, as well as its idyllic pleasures. Iain Crichton Smith's vivid evocation is loosely based on memories of his own childhood on Lewis. There are so many discoveries to be made, along the shore and on the moor. Crossing a field under snow has its perils; exploring an empty cottage has its imaginative terrors; you might be humiliated by a village woman when your mother has sent you to a neighbour to borrow half-a-crown until her pension comes through: or playing along the shore with Pauline, a visitor from London with her wider knowledge of the world, you might find your own certainties called into question. There is poverty and richness; and eventually the war casts its shadows across your world. Iain Crichton Smith has brought to life a gallery of distinctly memorable figures: the sure-footed Blinder with his amazing sense of the island terrain; Stork with his wooden leg; Speedy, the reluctant footballer; Jim returned after twenty years in America with such stories ... The author's own sense of the terrain, and of the characters who inhabit it, is equally sure and beautifully precise; his book will evoke for all ages the inner-emotions of growing up, as well as the outward sights and scents of an island experience.

On the Island

Michael Longley

Barry Tebb

Iain Crichton Smith, Barry Tebb, Michael Longley

Three Regional Voices

George Mackay Brown

Norman MacCaig

Iain Crichton Smith, Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown

Ralph Simmons, a writer, struggles to survive a nervous breakdown that leaves him anxious, suspicious, and frightened. In the Middle of the Wood is considered by many to be Iain Crichton Smith's most remarkable achievement in prose. Like Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, it derives directly from a phase of paranoia, which in Crichton Smith's case actually led to a spell in a mental hospital.

In the Middle of the Wood

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 D?in do Eimhir agus D?in 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 yet, in Edwin Morgan's words, 'open to the whole intellectual world'.

The titular Mr Dixon is not the novel's main character but the creation of the novel's main character, Tom Spence. Spence describes himself as "an embryo novelist"; he has had the odd job - for example, delivering mail - but is largely without skills and has bet all on his career as a writer. Unfortunately he has "never brought a novel to a successful conclusion" never mind had one published, and, unable to live the dream, has instead dreamed it through his protagonist, Drew Dixon. His novel has ground to a halt because he has decided Dixon will "meet a girl of twenty-five or thereabouts whose entry into his world was to change his life" but has no idea how to write it. Fortuitously he meets a young woman, Ann, and, as their relationship develops we begin to sense that it will be Spence's life that is changed rather than Dixon's. As Spence's isolation ends he revisits his past, attempting to contact the mother he hasn't seen in years and returning to his old school to see the English teacher who he believes encouraged him to write. Increasingly his admiration for Dixon turns to hatred and Spence is forced to choose between life and art.

Goodbye, Mr Dixon

A superb novel ... it must be accorded tremendous acclaim' - Scotland on Sunday 'Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation' - The Times In the grey streets of Glasgow, Martin is dreaming of the mist-shrouded islands of his youth. Behind her desk in the travel agency his wife Jean dreams of faraway places in the sun that beckon from the brochures. Their marriage frays in the silence as Martin clings to the Gaelic he teaches at the university, the dwindling bedrock of the culture of the isles, while Jean refuses to speak a language that brings back memories of the bitter years of her childhood. While Jean chatters with her friends of relationships and resentments, Martin turns to Gloria who seems to share his dream of the islands of the Gael... Iain Crichton Smith's The Dream explores the precarious survival of a modern marriage with a poet's lean, evocative precision and all the spellbinding authority of a master storyteller in the time-honoured Celtic tradition.

The Dream

The world, in Iain Crichton Smith's vision is a field full of folk; and one Scottish village is its microcosm. Here, the Minister wrestles with his loss of faith, and his cancer, concealing them even from his wife, but she had divined them. Mrs Berry cultivates her garden assiduously, and when Jehovah's Witnesses come quoting their texts, she tells them that the hill at the end of the village can be climbed by many paths. Old Annie has no doubts about her path: she has no use for Christianity ('Protestants and Catholics, nothing but guns and fighting') and finds her answer in the East. On more mundane levels, Morag Bheag worries about her son serving in Northern Ireland, and Chrissie Murray shocks the village by leaving her husband and making for Glasgow - taking only a radio with her, that's what shocks most. Murdo Macfarlane vehemently urges his puritanical views - about, for instance, the use of the church hall for a young people's dance - and David Collins nurses his hatred of Germans, but cannot insult them when they come as tourists. In short, it's a village much like any other, with its prejudices and certainties and kindliness and heartbreak: the whole and the small part. As the Minister sees in his visionary moment at the annual sports, when the petty disputes over the wheel-barrow race and the tragic news of young Bheag's death come together in his realisation that it's all a part of 'this supremely imperfect and perfect earth.' Mr Crichton Smith's novels never carry any superfluous weight: they're as spare as sprinters. He writes with a poet's concentration, and never more precisely, or more movingly, than here, in what amounts to a gentle, compassionate meditation on life and death, with a warm, affirmative conclusion.

A Field Full of Folk

The tenement has its being, its almost independent being, in a small Scottish town. Built of grey granite, more than a century ago, it stands four-square in space and time, the one fixed point in the febrile lives of the transient human beings whom it shelters. At the time of which Iain Crichton Smith writes, there are married couples in three of the flat; two widows and a widower occupy the others. All of them are living anxious lives of quiet desperation, which Mr Smith anatomises with cool and delicate understanding. The Masons, Linda and John, are the youngest and perhaps the happiest house-hold, who can still look to the future with hope: he has quite a well-paid job in a freezer shop, she is expecting a child. Mr Cooper's role in life is humbler: he is a lavatory attendant, but can take an off pride in his work. The Camerons provide drama: the husbands, once a long distance lorry driver who was sacked for heavy drinking and now a casual labourer, is consumed with unreasoning hate of Catholics, and when drunk becomes a raging brute who batters and terrifies his wife. Trevor Porter, an ex-teacher who like to think of himself as a poet (unpublished), is destroying his marriage by his self-absorption, though after his wife has surprised him by dying of cancer he feel guilt-ridden. Mrs Floss is the tenement's most colourful inhabitant: the widow of a local hotel owner, she still has money and can indulge in holiday cruises and foreign lovers. Mrs Miller, up on the top floor, is odd-woman-out even in this company of loners: since her husband was killed by lightening, crucified on the telephone wires he was repairing, she has become a slatternly recluse, who finds occasional drinking companions among the town's down-and-outs. The course of several of these lives reaches a startling crisis during the little party to celebrate the birth of the Masons' child. But Iain Crichton Smith declines any easy resolution of events. His fascinatingly ill-assorted group of characters, brought together only by grey granite, are left to struggle on, with their own strengths and weaknesses.

The Tenement

Trevor Griersor, a Scottish university lecturer, is spending a term in Canberra, lecturing on Scottish authors. One day a stranger phones, with garbled news of Trevor's brother Norman who vanished in Australia many years before, and has since, according to the caller, become an alcoholic and been in trouble with the police. Trevor feels overwhelmed with guilt, for having neglected his brother for so long. He imagines him penniless now, a down-and-out, drunk in the gutter; or perhaps even lying in a pauper's grave. He resolves that he must trace him, and travels to Sydney to begin his search. The search takes him to government offices, police stations, the Salvation Army, a squalid doss-house; and his experiences drive him into a state of panic. But why does he feel so compelled to search? As Douglas, that ambiguous Iago-like figure who first phoned him, now says, Norman won't be at all the younger brother of eighteen years ago; he'll be a stranger. If he's an alcoholic, he may be violent. He's unlikely to thank Trevor for seeking to patronise him by 'rescuing' him. Trevor has asked himself - and it's the basic question that faces the reader too - 'Am I my brothers' keeper?' Does he really care about his brother, or is he acting from a sense of duty? This is the novel's crux, and Trevor's cross, which he bears with him to a highly ironical conclusion. It's an absorbing study of conscience and responsibility, written with all of Crichton Smith's quiet authority.

The Search

Although best known as one of Scotland's greatest modern poets, Iain Crichton Smith was also prolific as a writer of short stories. These pieces form a central part of his oeuvre, demonstrating the full range and versatility of his literary talent. From humor to tragedy, from inner monologues to extrovert surrealism, the diversity of his writing indicates the extraordinary range of his own reading and vivid mental world. Crichton Smith wrote short stories throughout his life. Some are vignettes, others novellas, and the best of them show him to be an author of unique sensitivity and intelligence. This book is part of a two-volume collection, comprising the complete English stories, including a large number that have never previously been published in book form, as well as others that have been out of print for many years, thus making it possible to judge Crichton Smith's achievement as a writer in full

The Complete English Short Stories, 1949-76

The Red Door

‘The range and variety of his work, and the naturalness of his best pieces, will always attract and please. If he has anger, he also has compassion, and he opens our ears to “the unpredicted voices of our kind”’ Edwin Morgan Iain Crichton Smith was one of Scotland’s most prolific writers – from short stories, novels, radio and stage plays to critical essays and volumes of poetry. A reticent man who was addicted to detective fiction and doing crosswords, he was raised speaking Gaelic on the island of Lewis. At school in Stornoway he learned English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture was divided: two languages, two histories. His divided perspective delineated the tyranny and dogma of religion, the cramped life of small communities and gave him a compassionate eye for the struggle of women and men in a world defined by denials. After the Dance confirms that big themes – love, history, power, submission, death – can be addressed without the foil of irony and acquire resonance when given a local habitation and a voice that risks pure, humane, impassioned speech.

Iain Crichton Smith

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