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Fulton somewhat wistfully remarked in the introduction to an earlier Selected (whose launch in Dundee I was lucky enough to attend): ‘prolific writers go on being prolific’.There were indeed many books to come after that 1981 Macdonald selection and the more streamlined one from Carcanet, although Crichton Smith was only seventy when he died: A Life (1986), The Village and Other Poems (1989), Ends and Beginnings (1994), The Human Face (1996), The Leaf and the Marble (1998) and the posthumous A Country for Old Men & My Canadian Uncle (2000). He wrote poems as one might skim pebbles on the sea, hoping one or two of them will take off. I am immensely grateful for Matthew McGuire’s scholarly edition, but the 1985 Selected remained my template, since it represents the poet’s own choice. Yet I couldn’t resist some pebble-hunting, so I also read all the original collections and found myself picking treasures from the sea-bed around Lewis. While respecting the poet-editor’s judgment, the way he ensured there was a balance of light and dark, I have tried to bring a fresh (not necessarily Scottish) perspective for those who feel they already have the measure of Iain Crichton Smith, while maintaining some sort of chronology. My intention was to bring out certain facets he kept in the shadows, as well as highlighting the experimental late work, the broader reach, the more international outlook. Iain Crichton Smith should be considered as a European writer rather than a ‘Regional’ one, which is how he was too often presented. Yes, he was shaped by the Isle of Lewis and its Calvinism, but only as Robert Lowell (‘the poet I admire most and find closest to myself ’) was shaped by Boston. He had plenty to say about, for example, South Africa, Australia, Palestine, Rome, Renaissance art and the Russian Revolution, TV and love. He was often very funny, too. There is even a surrealist streak, especially among the several dozen poems xiv
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here that didn’t make it into the Carcanet Selected or the New Collected. Since ‘Iain Mac a’Ghobhainn’ also wrote in Gaelic – as the troubling pun in the last line of ‘Poem of Lewis’ reminds us – I felt I could not exclude that side of his work; a Selected Poems in English would short-change the reader, and Crichton Smith’s translations of Mac a’Ghobhainn are very fine. It seemed better to omit entirely his versions of Alexander Macdonald, Duncan Ban MacIntyre and Sorley MacLean which can be found in the New Collected, but would not flourish in these rather more cramped conditions. I was also obliged to drop some of the long poems, although I have found room for what Donald Tovey would have called ‘bleeding chunks’. John Greening xv

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Fulton somewhat wistfully remarked in the introduction to an earlier Selected (whose launch in Dundee I was lucky enough to attend): ‘prolific writers go on being prolific’.There were indeed many books to come after that 1981 Macdonald selection and the more streamlined one from Carcanet, although Crichton Smith was only seventy when he died: A Life (1986), The Village and Other Poems (1989), Ends and Beginnings (1994), The Human Face (1996), The Leaf and the Marble (1998) and the posthumous A Country for Old Men & My Canadian Uncle (2000). He wrote poems as one might skim pebbles on the sea, hoping one or two of them will take off.

I am immensely grateful for Matthew McGuire’s scholarly edition, but the 1985 Selected remained my template, since it represents the poet’s own choice. Yet I couldn’t resist some pebble-hunting, so I also read all the original collections and found myself picking treasures from the sea-bed around Lewis. While respecting the poet-editor’s judgment, the way he ensured there was a balance of light and dark, I have tried to bring a fresh (not necessarily Scottish) perspective for those who feel they already have the measure of Iain Crichton Smith, while maintaining some sort of chronology. My intention was to bring out certain facets he kept in the shadows, as well as highlighting the experimental late work, the broader reach, the more international outlook.

Iain Crichton Smith should be considered as a European writer rather than a ‘Regional’ one, which is how he was too often presented. Yes, he was shaped by the Isle of Lewis and its Calvinism, but only as Robert Lowell (‘the poet I admire most and find closest to myself ’) was shaped by Boston. He had plenty to say about, for example, South Africa, Australia, Palestine, Rome, Renaissance art and the Russian Revolution, TV and love. He was often very funny, too. There is even a surrealist streak, especially among the several dozen poems xiv

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