Ravishing Europa
£10.00
Ravishing Europa, Peter Robinson’s eleventh collection, marks a wholly unexpected development in the poet’s work, prompted, as evident throughout, by the fissures exported from a political party to an entire country and beyond by the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union. Its consequences cast crucial events for this poet, both personal and public, into unforeseen fresh lights. Prompted by a televised debate to wonder in the title poem upon what impulse the founding European myth is based, Robinson’s new poems search through his individual and cultural memory to offer, as the book unfolds, an answer.
UK Shipping
UK Shipping
Letter 2nd Class £2.50
Small Parcel £3.99
Medium Parcel £6.50
International Shipping
Ireland
International Standard - Small Letter £6.60 - £10.10
International Standard - Medium Parcel £11.60 - 16.05
USA
International Standard - £6.60 - £16.16
International Standard - Medium Parcel - £39.20 - £76.00
International
International Standard - £6.60 - £15.00
Ravishing Europa, Peter Robinson’s eleventh collection, marks a wholly unexpected development in the poet’s work, prompted, as evident throughout, by the fissures exported from a political party to an entire country and beyond by the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union. Its consequences cast crucial events for this poet, both personal and public, into unforeseen fresh lights. Prompted by a televised debate to wonder in the title poem upon what impulse the founding European myth is based, Robinson’s new poems search through his individual and cultural memory to offer, as the book unfolds, an answer.
Roy Fisher’s observation that Peter Robinson is ‘alert for the moments when tectonic plates of mental experience slide quietly one beneath another to create paradoxes and complexities that call for poems to be made’ could not be more apt for Ravishing Europa, whose every line is carefully listening in to our interesting times.
The Hard and the Soft of It
1
Unforeseen snowdrops spot mud verges,
banks of them, and carpet copses
through countryside as fear
of trespass gets the better of us
out where loneliness clarifies
nothing towards North Sea horizons;
and, look, its wind-farm turbines
are ready for our Don Quixotes
as they appear and disappear
in a misted depth of air…
2
where grey-and-white spots de-abstractify
to seagulls in cloud-covered pools
surrounded by broad ochre sand-stripes;
each stratified, perceptual plane
de-abstractifies, now, before our eyes
to derelict wayside hostelries
nobody could make a go of, gone
along trunk roads from the coast and, sure,
they are welcome to more lost past
if they’ll spare us a bit of snatched future!
Published: 29 March 2019
ISBN: 9781905208432
Pages: 95
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.
