Full Volume
Diving-suited, copper-helmeted, no thought of turning back,
Led by his grey lead boots way, way off the beaten track,
He walks into Loch Ness. His unheard wife and daughter
Stand hand-in-hand on the shore. Underwater,
He ploughs on down on his own, bone-cold marathon,
Stomping the loch not for any sponsorship he’s won,
Not seeking front pages, nor getting caught up in some blinding
Damascus flash, but just for the love of that dark, reminding
Him and his folks here and all the folks
Back home that, despite the old jokes,
Hoaxes, photos, no-shows, and tourists’ tales,
Something is in there, out there, down there, flails and dwells
In inner silence. He wants to meet
It, to come back dry, dripping, and greet
The day from the loch’s beyond, its call
Calling inside him. Wants above all
To sound the loch’s full volume right at ground
Level, be lost in it, pushed by it, sung by it, not to be found.
from Full Volume (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008)
Robert Crawford, an exact contemporary of Robin Robertson (see no.3), is passionate about Scotland – past, present and future. His poetry is nourished by his native land, its intellectual and practical achievements – especially in the sciences – and its literary heritage; he has written the best modern biography of Robert Burns (The Bard, 2009). Hugely productive as an editor, critic and poet, he is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews, and has recently published the first volume of a biography of T.S. Eliot.
He has written in Scots, made versions of Gaelic poems and translated from the Latin of Renaissance Scottish poets, and is keenly attuned to the spring of rhythm and the pleasures of rhyme, as in ‘Full Volume’. Typically, this poem is both playful and questioning. Crawford knows that the myth of the Loch Ness monster feeds a profitable tourist trade, and also that beneath that surface lies something truly unfathomed, not only the second deepest loch in Scotland, but something in the human psyche that needs to
resist discovery.
Find out more about Robert Crawford here and hear him reading and talking in the SPL podcast series.
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