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Robin RobertsonRobin Robertson
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BiographyRobin Robertson is from the north-east coast of Scotland. He is the author of four collections of poetry: A Painted Field (1997), winner of the 1997 Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection), the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award; Slow Air (2002); Swithering (2006); and The Wrecking Light (2010).
He is also the editor of Mortification: Writers’ Stories of their Public Shame (2003). In 2004, he was named by the Poetry Book Society as one of the 'Next Generation' poets, and received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives and works in London.
Robin Robertson's third poetry collection, Swithering (2006), was shortlisted for the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize and won the 2006 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year). His translation of Euripides' Medea was published in 2008, and in 2009, his poem, 'At Roane Head', won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Poetry
BibliographyFirebird 3: Writing Today (editor) Penguin, 1984 Firebird 4: New Writing from Britain and Ireland (editor) Penguin, 1985 32 Countries: photographs of Ireland by Donovan Wylie with new writing by thiry-two Irish writers (eidtor) Secker & Warburg, 1989 Camera Obscura Colophon Press, 1996 A Painted Field Picador, 1997 Penguin Modern Poets Volume 3 (with Michael Hoffman and Michael Longley) Penguin, 1998 Slow Air Picador, 2002 Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame (editor) Fourth Estate, 2003 Actaeon: The Early Years Grand Phoenix Press, 2006 Swithering Picador, 2006 The Deleted World/Tomas Transtromer (translated versions) Enitharnom, 2006 Medea/Euripides (translator) Vintage, 2008 The Wrecking Light Picador, 2010
Prizes and awards1997 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize A Painted Field 1997 Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) A Painted Field 1997 Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award A Painted Field 2004 E. M. Forster Award 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Swithering 2006 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) Swithering 2009 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) ('At Roane Head')
Critical PerspectiveFrom Robin Robertson’s latest poetry collection, Swithering (2006), ‘What the Horses See at Night’ is a brilliantly oblique narrative made up of a series of menacing images of the natural world. The birds settle in trees that are ‘creaking’, a mink’s face ‘is already slippery with yolk’, and the fox’s ‘call is red / and ribboned’. But the images end up at home, ‘our children / breathing slowly in their beds’. How real the threat to them is remains uncertain. As Robertson explained in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin, ‘swithering’ is a Scots word meaning both hesitation and ‘things that are indeterminate … fluctuate, move fitfully’. What John Banville aptly called the ‘plangent, bitter music’ of his work gains these qualities from dream-like imagery, creating an atmosphere of psychological unease. He is fond of epigraphs taken from classical authors or Ecclesiastes (‘omnia vanitas’). And, like Northern Irish poets such as Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, he often seeks to amalgamate the classical and the contemporary, although his subject matter is more personal than political.
He has rapidly become one of the most admired poets of recent years, despite not publishing his first collection until he was already in his forties. A Painted Field (1997), however, won that year’s Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection), being praised by Kazuo Ishiguro, writing in The Sunday Times, for ‘darkly chiselled poems haunted by mortality and the fragility of life’s pleasures’. Of particular significance to the book’s themes of mortality and human transience is the concluding sequence, ‘Camera Obscura’, named after the Edinburgh landmark. Through this, we are presented with views of the city as both ‘this acropolis of light’, and a tourist trap where ‘Skeins of the tour-guide’s commentary / ravel past the rock / in snatches’. It becomes clear that the narrator is searching for someone, a lost love perhaps: ‘A clutch / of backpackers blocks my view, then the sun opens/ and you are there. Your hair, your hand. A touch’. Yet ‘what we came to find / is fading, leaching away’, and ‘our young ghosts’ are ‘in a time-lapse film / of flowers and rotting fruit’ (‘The Gift of Tantalus’).
‘Escapology’, ‘After the Overdose’, and ‘Lithium’, discuss suicide bids, self-harm and mental illness in the family. But the intensity of a poem such as ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’ moves us more precisely because its anguish is distanced. This version of Ovid’s story of Apollo punishing the satyr gives us the monologue of the torturer, interspersed with unflinching details of the act itself, ‘his birthday suit sloughed / the way a sodden overcoat is eased / off the shoulders and dumped’. And ‘everywhere, the purling flux of blood / in the land and the swirl of it flooding away’. The implied context for this atrocity may be glimpsed in certain other poems set in Northern Ireland, such as ‘Advent in Co. Fermanagh’, whose local greengrocer ‘doubles as undertaker’, and army soldiers cradle weapons ‘like a newborn child’. The book concludes in a graveyard, where ‘to enclose is to make sacred, / to frame life’s chaos for a slow repair’, making ‘an art of healing’ which is ‘against despair’ (‘Amnesty in the Garden’).
Certain titles in his next book, Slow Air (2002), appear to continue the theme of grief. These are ‘Maroon, Over Black on Red’, describing the life and work of suicidal painter Mark Rothko, ‘The Woods of the Suicides’ (a passage from Dante’s Inferno), three nightmares about ‘Anxiety’, and ‘Sorrows’, about the death of his father: ‘Forgive me, I say, at his feet, / through a mouthful of nails’. But again, the voice of true feeling is arguably heard most effectively through a classical mouthpiece. In ‘Asterion and the God’, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the cynical views of the god Dionysus about Ariadne and her faithless lover Theseus are interspersed with the monologue of the minotaur himself (‘They say a stranger comes / to release me. Let him come soon’). The antidote to death is sex, about which Robertson’s poems tend to be more suspicious. ‘Dream of the Huntress’ refers to ‘traps of desire’ for the ‘mutinous’ flesh, while in ‘Exposure’ a couple lie in bed, ‘in grim embrace, these / two halves trying to be whole’. There’s an undercurrent of erotic wordplay in the outstanding sonnet ‘Wedding the Locksmith’s Daughter’ (whose title refers to a 19th-century slang phrase for a key). ‘The slow-grained slide to embed the blade / of the key is a sheathing’, and it brings imagery and symbols tightly together in ‘the clinch of words – the hidden couplings / in the cased machine’.
Having worked in the publishing industry for more than 20 years, Robertson’s idea for soliciting the quirky reminiscences in Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (2003) apparently came whilst accompanying his authors to their readings. ‘What all or most writers want is communication with the public’, he informed The New York Times (14 April, 2004), in a somewhat deadpan manner, ‘but then there are those accidental, messy discharges that occur’. These anecdotes of the literary life include William Trevor reading in a bookshop to his driver and ‘two people who wandered in’, and the similar discomforts of Michael Ondaatje and Carl Hiassen. Margaret Drabble confesses how an audience questioner once mistook her for Lynne Reid Banks; Simon Armitage recalls finding a signed copy of a book of his thrown away, while Glyn Maxwell and Vicki Feaver ruefully relate the perils of reading poems to classes of unruly schoolchildren.
Editing the latter was no doubt light relief during the writing of Swithering. His third collection is divided into two sections, and Robertson has pointed out that it is ‘imbedded with dualities, translations and transfigurations’. Thus ‘The Death of Actaeon’ is another blood-drenched slice of Ovid, ‘Actaeon: the Early Years’ a similarly brilliant sequence. There are also the usual haunted personal notes, as in ‘At Dawn’, where a dream-like walk along a mountain path leads to a ruined croft, finding ‘the earth floor seething with ants’, disturbing items relating to himself and ‘the lopped head of a roe deer, / its throat full of wire’. And in ‘Ghost of a Garden’, a sleepwalker to the tool-shed is suddenly aware that in the corner ‘my father is weeping / and I cannot help him because he is dead’. Robin Robertson’s poetry has a distinct integrity; drawing one right into its unsettling world, it slowly reveals a somewhat bleak, uncompromising, but compelling view of human relations.
Dr. Jules Smith, 2006
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