The Fourth Quarter deals with the ageing that comes to all of us. Memory fades and yet memories become more vivid. People and birds, seas and mountains, friends, children and grandchildren are so vibrant that we want to live among them for good, although we know we cannot. Bitter-sweet, comic and tragic, lyrical and elegiac, stoical and anguished, The Fourth Quarter rejoices in the giddy contradictions of nature and laments its deadlier necessities as David Craig tells stories of his own and others' lives.
"In a culture obsessed by youth, it is heartening to encounter a poet who treats the nature of ageing... In his fourth quarter, Craig is a better poet than ever."
"David Craig's poems are strong, clear-eyed, stripped for action. They give the lie to those who believe that to be a socialist is to abandon individual vision."
Adrian Mitchell
"A general kind of Scots hard-edge and dryness. Dunbar must sound far-fetched ; but that line of poetic blood."
John Fowles
David Craig was born in Aberdeen in 1932. He has worked in schools, adult education and universities in Scotland, Sri Lanka and England. He taught Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster from 1969-92 (and still does so part-time). His books include three novels, (most recently The Unbroken Harp), five books of travel and oral history and four collections of poetry. He and his wife, the writer Anne Spillard, live in Cumbria.
The Fourth Quarter, by David Craig
ISBN 0-9548691-7-6
Price: £5.99
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