FOREWORD The third and most recent Selected Poems by Iain Crichton Smith (1928–98) appeared in 1985, when his name was familiar from The New Poetry and Penguin Modern Poets. He is still well known in Scotland, where his Highland Clearances novel, Consider the Lilies, has been much used in the classroom; but since the 1992 Collected which he oversaw, and despite an invaluable revised New Collected (2011, ed. McGuire) his poetry has rather drifted out of focus. Certainly, the context in which a reader might encounter it now looks very different, more diverse, less exclusively male. But while other poets of his generation have been revived and celebrated (George Mackay Brown has had at least two biographies), there haven’t been many voices speaking up for this particular islander. Seamus Heaney valued him enough to place him alongside Brown, Sorley MacLean and Norman MacCaig in his elegy ‘Would They Had Stay’d’.* He points us to ‘Deer on the High Hills’ (‘Iain’s poem/Where sorrow just sits and rocks.’), Crichton Smith’s own favourite, and undoubtedly his greatest achievement, which is why I have chosen it for the overall title. In compiling a manageable selection for today’s readers, I was faced with a number of challenges – chiefly, what to do about all the poems omitted from that very substantial New Collected (well over a hundred from books published in the 1970s alone) and those scattered elsewhere in magazines and anthologies which have never been reprinted. As Robin * ‘Would They Had Stay’d’, Electric Light (Faber, 2001). xiii