Anna Crowe introducing Stephen Scobie

Scottish poet Anna Crow introduces Canadian-based poet Stephen Scobie

Anna Crowe (Scotland)

Anna Crowe was born in Devonport in 1945, and grew up in France and in Sussex. She has an MA from the University of St Andrews, where she and her family have lived permanently since 1986.

She is a poet, translator and as a creative writing tutor, and won the Peterloo Open Poetry Competition in 1993 and 1997. Her collections are Skating Out of the House (Peterloo Poets, 1997), Punk with Dulcimer (Peterloo Poets, 2006) and a pamphlet of poems, A Secret History of Rhubarb (Mariscat Press, 2004). Her translations of poetry include poems by Catalan poets Anna Aguilar-Amat (Music and Scurvy, online publication by Sandstone Press in 2004), and Joan Margarit, Tugs in the Fog (Bloodaxe, 2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. She is working on an anthology of Catalan poetry in translation, to be published jointly by the Scottish Poetry Library and Carcanet Press in 2007.

She is a co-founder and, for the first seven years, was Artistic Director of StAnza, Scotland's Poetry Festival. In June 2005 she was awarded a Travelling Scholarship by the Society of Authors.

…introducing Stephen Scobie (Canada)

Stephen Scobie and I were students together at St Andrews, when he was in his fourth year, already a fluent poet, knowledgeable film-buff and expert on the music of Bob Dylan, and I was a bejantine, as first-year students were then called. A group of us used to meet in Tad's Café to have lunch and play the juke-box. Our liking for the Kinks earned us the scornful jibe, from local high-school kids, of 'has-been teenagers!'

After Stephen went to Canada to do his doctorate, and then stayed to teach English literature in a Canadian University (he teaches at the University of Victoria), we lost touch. Years later, I had the bright idea of inviting him (he now had many poetry collections and prizes and other publications to his name) to come and read his work at StAnza [ the Scottish poetry festival in St Andrews ], which he did in 2004, giving an electrifying performance. His poetry is richly allusive, drawing on his wide and intimate knowledge of literature, music, art and history, to pursue his themes of sorrow and desire. He has been described as 'the restless connoisseur of travel', and he certainly knows Paris and its troubled literary history as well as anyone, and better than most. He is a poet's poet, deeply satisfying to read closely, and his fierce, lyrical poems yield up more and more with each successive reading.

› Read more by Anna Crowe on Stephen Scobie

› Read poems by Stephen Scobie