Traversing the globe, Old World is a generous, playful collection about the issues facing our planet today, from a major Scots poet and biographer

'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. There are riddles and haikus as well as verse influenced by both Western and Eastern cultures, which arrive 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.

'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

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.