"Crowe knows just how much to give and how much to hold back, offering fleeting glances and sometimes strange images... These are sinewy, questing poems, alive with memory and attentive to the interior landscape."

PBS selectors on Figure in a Landscape

"Words which come to mind when reading Anna Crowe's wonderful poetry are 'honest', 'affectionate', 'elegiac', 'skilful', 'natural', 'lucid'.

Douglas Dunn on Punk with Dulcimer

With their inviting blend of elegance and musicality, and captivating breadth of cultural reference, Anna Crowe's poems offer an illuminating insight into the marvels of and uncanny links between the natural world and its creatures, and the shifts of light and shade in our own lives - most touchingly, when vulnerable and bereft. Not on the Side of the Gods, constantly demanding a pause for reflection or gasp of wonderment, is both celebratory and - as in the opening poem, "The Gecko" - imbued with a heart-stopping tenderness and sense of loss.

Stewart Conn

I read Not On The Side Of The Gods with growing admiration. It was like wandering through a fabulous living museum, filled with places and plants, birds and other creatures and, often, most movingly, with the people they call to mind. Anna Crowe does exactly what the caddis-fly larva does in her poem, 'Jeweller in the Galerie Electra, Paris' - building for each vulnerable creature a house of jewelled words. What I came away with was not just the richness and precision of her descriptions but a cornucopia of sounds, not least the wonderful music of her voice..

Vicki Feaver

About the Author
Anna Crowe, born in Plymouth in 1945, is a poet and translator and the author of four poetry collections in English: Figure in a Landscape (2010), a Poetry Book Society Choice which was translated into Catalan and published in a bilingual edition as Paisatge amb figura (Ensiola, 2011) and which also received the Callum MacDonald Memorial Award in 2011; Skating Out of the House (1997), A Secret History of Rhubarb (2006), Punk with Dulcimer (2006); one in Spanish / English bilingual edition: L'anima del teixidor (2000); and one in Catalan: Punk con salterio, translated by Joan Margarit (2008). She has translated three of Joan Margarit's collections: Tugs in the Fog (Bloodaxe, 2006, a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation); Barcelona, amor final (2007, Catalan / Castilian / English trilingual edition); Strangely Happy (Bloodaxe, 2011). She has also translated Anna Aguilar-Amat's Musica i escorbut (Blesok, 2006); with Iolanda Pelegri, an anthology of Catalan poetry, Miralls d'aigua (Light Off Water, Scottish Poetry Library / Carcanet Press, 2006); and, for Arc Publications Six Catalan Poets edited by Pere Ballart (2013), and Peatlands by the Mexican poet Pedro Serrano (2014). Along with several other writers, she was a founder member of StAnza, the Scottish international poetry festival, and was artistic director during its first seven years. She has twice won the Peterloo Open Poetry competition, and in 2005 won a travelling scholarship from the Society of Authors.


Book Information
ISBN 9781911469919
Author Anna Crowe
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Arc Publications
Publisher Arc Publications