# Testament

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/robert-crawford/testament/9780224098076

![Testament](https://quivercdn.com/covers/jonathan-cape/robert-crawford/testament_978-02-2409-807-6.jpg?v=2026-04-24%2010%3A23%3A40)

- Book: [Testament](https://www.bookquiver.com/robert-crawford/testament) ([Testament.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/robert-crawford/testament.md))
- Authors: [Robert Crawford](https://www.bookquiver.com/robert-crawford)
- Publisher: jonathan_cape
- ISBN: 978-02-2409-807-6
- Pages: 80
- Published: 2014-07-03
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

To make a testament is to attempt to pass on what matters most. In his seventh full-length collection of poems Robert Crawford writes of love, loss, belief, and commitment. Whether in intimate erotic lyrics or in a sustained engagement with the politics of Scottish independence he writes with passion, wit, and assurance about struggles to pass on values and treasures. The book opens with a sequence of love poems, and closes with ‘Testament’, a startlingly fresh gathering of deftly rhymed paraphrases based on the New Testament. Whether making versions of Cavafy or elegising fellow poet Mick Imlah, or writing how a father hands on a piece of marble to his son, Robert Crawford shows in Testament how poetry can communicate from generation to generation aspects of what makes us most vulnerably and engagingly human.