He spoke as if from the other side of death
quite clearly and quite impressively.
I think from your side it is tragedy
but from my side here it's really comedy
dry, not furious but temperate...


from 'He Spoke'
             

Shortly before his death in 1998, Iain Crichton Smith wrote to his publisher with a manuscript. 'I am sending you this in case anything happens.' A Country for Old Men was the book, typed in his usual erratic way, and including - the title's tribute to Yeats - the exceptional final fruits of one of the most impassioned and moving of the Scottish poets of this century. Smith was always unusual in his ability to play the whole poetic instrument, without apologies, without stylistic ironies.

'We move at random on an innocent journey', he wrote in one of his most celebrated poems, and this innocence remains the hallmark of his last poems. His human and his poetic task was to take randomness and give it significant form, one that draws answering forms from history and legend.

His narrative and dramatic poem My Canadian Uncle is much earlier than A Country for Old Men and represents the poet's ambitious experiments with form, especially those forms which seem to bridge the gap between the poetic, prose narrative and drama.