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

‘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

"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" - Sunday Herald