The Fourth Quarter deals with the aging 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. '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