Like The Living End
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‘Like the Living End’, an elegy occasioned by the sudden death of a school friend, is the centre-piece of this gathering of poems, completed since The Returning Sky (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Peter Robinson is alive as ever in these poems touched by the passing of the years, by illness and mortality, themes that he addresses with characteristic delicacy, candour, and improvised formal poise.
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‘Like the Living End’, an elegy occasioned by the sudden death of a school friend, is the centre-piece of this gathering of poems, completed since The Returning Sky (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Described as ‘the finest poet of his generation’ and ‘the finest poet alive when it comes to the probing of shifts in atmosphere, momentary changes in the weather of the mind’, Peter Robinson is alive as ever in these poems touched by the passing of the years, by illness and mortality, themes that he addresses with characteristic delicacy, candour, and improvised formal poise, each one in Adam Piette’s words ‘an astonishingly finely-tuned gauge for recording the pressures and processes that generate lived occasions.’
Between Parentheses
Most times, I’m like a multi-storey car park
where we can’t find the car.
Overcrowded or deserted, in an oil-stained half-dark,
I go from floor to floor.
But today, through a long spring evening,
transparent shadow’s equally spread
over this back-street brick and sandstone;
re-foliate flora cresting the hill,
two people are training their spaniel
to ‘Walk on!’ ‘Sit!’ and ‘Heel!’
as they each drop into a Polling Station.
Two lovers pause to kiss. Illuminated,
a gardener stoops among her flowers
when all a life’s conflated
into that view of brief duration …
It’s as if I could see me now.
Published: 30 September 2013
ISBN: 978 1 905208 19 7
Pages: 36
‘An astonishingly finely-tuned gauge for recording the pressures and processes that generate lived occasions.’
Adam Piette
Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953, and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He co-edited the magazines Perfect Bound and Numbers while helping organize various Cambridge Poetry Festivals and a Poetry International at the South Bank Centre. His many volumes of poetry include a Selected Poems (2003), Ghost Characters (2006) and The Look of Goodbye (2008). He was awarded the Cheltenham Prize for This Other Life (1988). Both The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems (2002) and The Returning Sky (2012) were recommendations of the Poetry Book Society. A translator of poetry, mainly from the Italian, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (with Marcus Perryman) appeared in 2006 and paperback in 2013.
He received the John Florio Prize for The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (2007) in 2008. Other publications include his aphorisms, Spirits of the Stair (2009), four volumes of literary criticism, the most recent being Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible (2010), various edited collections, anthologies, The Complete Poems, Translations & Selected Prose of Bernard Spencer (2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013). A collection of essays on his work, The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson ed. Adam Piette and Katy Price, appeared in 2007. The poetry editor for Two Rivers Press, he is Professor of English and American Literature, and currently Head of Department, at the University of Reading.
You can visit Peter’s website at: www.peterrobinsonpoet.co.uk
