ST ANDREWS is a town where the very old and very new rub up against each other, where the cosmopolitan and the couthy pass each other on the street every day. Sauntering down North Street, perhaps on your way to the university's English Department, you might pass the cobbles picking out the initials of Patrick Hamilton, the 16th century martyr whose death forms an early chapter in Scotland's weary sectarian history. Alternatively, you could encounter young scientists who are working on the latest astrophysical theory.

Robert Crawford, professor of modern Scottish literature at St Andrews, captured the town's contrariness in a poem in which, contrasting its size and location with its influence on the country's history, he described his adopted hometown as "a bullseye centred at the outer reaches".

"I like living in St Andrews," he says of the town in which he has taught since 1989. "It's a city that has at its heart this huge, smashed-up cathedral, this kind of big crucified building. You can't help but be forced to reflect on larger issues if you live here."

Evidence of Crawford's reflections on such "larger issues" can be found in his new poetry collection, Full Volume. Quoting Burns - on whom Crawford is currently penning a biography - the epigraph reads: "I'm truly sorry Man's Dominion/Has broken Nature's social union." This sundering works its way idiosyncratically into a number of Crawford's poems, including Chorus, which contrasts the decline of Border ballads when they "were written down/So one rich man might own/A people's songs" with plans by Cornell University to digitally record the songs of endangered species of bird. "If earth is ill//And local sights and sounds will drown,/Still dawn downloads again/Freely for everyone/Uncosted song".

"What I've tried to do," says Crawford, "is align some of those concerns we have about the environment with other concerns about diversity. Including linguistic diversity. Just as you wouldn't want species of birds to be extinguished, similarly, in our own small country, there are doubts about language diversity."

In that spirit, Full Volume conserves through a small number of translations, centuries-old, half-forgotten poems written originally in Gaelic or Latin. During the Renaissance, Latin was Europe's lingua franca; one Scottish poet who wrote in that tongue, George Buchanan (whom Crawford has translated), was better known across the Continent in that period than Shakespeare.

"In my imagination at least," says Crawford, "part of the impulse to get behind some of the versions of Gaelic and Latin poems in the collection has an ecological resonance." Could one call it poetic recycling? "I don't know if I want to call that it. It sounds like a policy document, and you never want your poetry to sound like a policy document."

Crawford was born in 1959 in Bellshill, Lanarkshire, an only child. In amusing and poignant detail, his poetry has touched on his tweedy 1960s childhood: "Dad polished shoes, boiled kettles for hot-water bottles,/And mother made pancakes, casseroles, lentil soup//On her New World cooker, its blue and cream/Obsolete before I was born.//I was a late, only child, campaigning/For 33 r.p.m records".

After graduating from Glasgow University, he completed a doctorate at Oxford, during a self-imposed exile from Scotland that would shape his academic and poetic career. "I lived for six years in England, a very formative period in my life. And I was in love with someone who was a refugee. I had to think very hard what my country meant to me and what it might mean, to not be able to live in one's own country. I hadn't reflected about it before then".

At the age of 30, Crawford arrived in St Andrews, already with one well-received book on TS Eliot under his belt, and a year away from the publication of his first poetry collection, A Scottish Assembly. From the title down, it was a confident, dynamic debut with much to say about Scotland's past and, perhaps more importantly, its future. Much attention was devoted to Scotland: an energetic paean to the country couched in the kind of technological jargon he first picked up from a semi-conductor scientist girlfriend, and which was now beginning to fascinate him. "Superconductor country, land crammed with intimate expanses,/Your cities are superlattices, heterojunctive/Graphed from the air, your cropmarked farmlands/Are epitaxies of tweed."

Crawford talks now of the need "to be true to the idiom and the texture of your age. And the texture of our age is strongly inflected by science. Lots of us spend good parts of our days interacting with technology. Poetry needs to reflect that and reflect on it."

He confesses that, as a poet, he is more interested in technology for its metaphorical possibilities than in its actual uses. Indeed, when Crawford does look at technology in itself, he is wary. The poem Really, from Full Volume, sends up chat-room babble. While acknowledging the internet's ability to open up the world as never before, he also describes the internet as "a numbing phenomenon".

Where technology has increasingly captured Crawford's imagination is in its surprising parallels with religion. "Things get recorded in this digital world which both exists and does not exist. I was fascinated by that dual status of the digital world - it's there and yet we cannot touch it. To me it had religious resonances.

"In an earlier book I tried to write about that as a metaphor for faith. I'm interested in how one might write religious or spiritual poems in what appears to be a secular and sceptical age. One thing I love about TS Eliot is his ability to write religious poetry in the 20th century."

Crawford describes himself as "a boring member of the Church of Scotland". Conscious that the word "religious" turns people off, he prefers to describe his own poetry as "spiritual". This melding of cutting-edge knowledge and old-time religion strikes me as quintessentially St Andrews.

Next month, Crawford will co-headline with Michael Longley an event on Irish and Scottish poetry at the Aberdeen Word Festival. Crawford is effusive about Longley and Irish literature, not least the way the Irish government got behind a campaign to spread Irish studies in universities outside Ireland, notably in North America. For him, it's a no-brainer that the Scottish government should get behind efforts to spread Scottish Studies to the United States and Canada.

When Crawford was a student, there were no Scottish literature courses in Scotland, never mind down south. It would make for a marvellous sign of the times should a small country, previously devilled by its infamous "cringe", aggressively promote its own art and values in the home of "cultural imperialism".

I ask him about the recent much spoken-of apparent spike upwards in Scottish confidence, particularly in its arts. Crawford, as an "Anglophile Scottish nationalist", is cautiously welcoming. The phrase "Scottish Renaissance" first appeared a century ago and has been regularly revived, he points out, but he acknowledges that "we are living in an era in which there are very impressive Scottish writers". Convinced literature is Scotland's greatest art form, he believes that native authors have a role to play in shaping Scottish consciousness over this unfolding century.

Reading the runes in his and his peers' novels and poetry, Crawford senses a shift in the way that literature interacts with national identity; a new expansion and engagement with the outer world, now that the battle for a Scottish parliament has been won.

"You can't have nationalism without internationalism," he says. "There's no point otherwise." He sees the country's writers and its political class learning from their international counterparts: the spread of Irish studies being a good example. The process is already underway but he wants to see more creative engagement with our neighbours, what he calls "a foreign policy of the imagination". Who would not vote for that?

Irish And Scottish Poetry - Michael Longley, Robert Crawford & Sinead Morrissey, is at the Word Festival, King's College Centre, King's College, Aberdeen on May 9, £5 (£3). 01224-641122 Full Volume is published by Cape, £9 Robert Crawford, left, believes St Andrews' crucified' cathedral inspires the town's inhabitants to focus on life's larger issues