RESULTS

No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns. Wonderfully readable, The Bard catches Burns's energy, brilliance, and radicalism as never before. To his international admirers he was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was 'sprung...from raking of dung', and to his political enemies a 'traitor'. Drawing on a surprising variety of untapped sources - from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, interviews and oratory by his contemporaries - this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves, and struggles of the great poet. Inspired by the American and French Revolutions and moulded by the Scottish Enlightenment, Burns was in several senses the first of the great Romantics. With a poet's insight and a shrewd sense of human drama, Robert Crawford outlines how Burns combined a childhood steeped in the peasant song-culture of rural Scotland with a consummate linguistic artistry to become not only the world's most popular love poet but also the controversial master poet of modern democracy.

Here is a distillation of the best work from one of Scotland's leading contemporary poets. Taken from his first six books, these poems confirm Robert Crawford as a poet of exhilarating energy wedded to a constantly refreshing delight in nuanced language. Richly nourished by his background, Crawford's work is both lyrical and wry. Its intelligent humour and attunement to our technological present are impressively fused with a deepening note of spirituality. Unpredictable yet recognisable, these are poems of beguiling vitality.

This new collection of Crawford's poetry is a celebration of the world he lives in. These are poems that are convincingly earthed in the land and the language and yet unafraid of spiritual, even religious notes, and shot through with a humour and vitality that is engaging.

A unique collaboration between leading poets and scientists, Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science demonstrates through its form, and through practice as well as reflection, that poetry and science can meet with productive results. Crossing between disciplines, and between prose and verse, the book shows how modes of scientific knowledge and of poetic making continue to be intertwined. Simon Armitage, Gillian Beer, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Miroslav Holub, Kay Redfield Jamison, and Edwin Morgan, the book includes a series of specially commissioned poems by John Burnside, Michael Donaghy, Sarah Maguire, Paul Muldoon, Don Paterson, and others. Each poem is introduced by the scientist whose work prompted the poem.