Robin Robertson
Acclaimed Scots Poet
Winner of the Forward Prize
“The genius of this Scots poet is for finding the sensually charged moment—in a raked northern seascape, in a sexual or gustatory encounter—and depicting it in language that is simultaneously spare and ample, and reminiscent of early Heaney or Hughes.” —New Yorker
“Each poem comes to us so cleansed of excess, so concentrated and perfectly pared down to its essence we can only wonder at the adamantine sharpness of its edges....Robertson the poet is not fooling around.”
—Billy Collins
“Robin Robertson is instantly recognisable as a poet of vivid authority, commanding a surprised, accurate language of his own. The evocative truth and the crystalline ring of his words, line by line, make a kind of hope in themselves.” —W.S. Merwin
Robin Robertson is from the northeast coast of Scotland and now lives in London. The Poetry Archive calls him "a poet of austere and meticulous diction, tempered by a sensuous music." A Painted Field (Harcourt) won a number of awards on first publication in the UK, including the 1997 Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Scottish First Book of the Year Award. His second book, Slow Air, was published in 2002. His third collection, Swithering (Harcourt, 2006), won the 2006 Forward Prize, the Scotish Arts Council Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the the T.S. Eliot Prize for 2006. His fourth collection, The Wrecking Light, (UK: Picador, 2010 and USA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) was shortlisted for Britain’s three national poetry prizes: the Costa Poetry Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. He is the first poet to have won Forward Prize in all three categories: Best Single Poem in 2009 (for 'At Roane Head'), Best Collection (for Swithering, 2006) and Best First Collection (for A Painted Field, 1997). His poetry appears regularly in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.
Robertson is also a translator. He published The Deleted World, a selection of new versions of the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer's poems, in 2006, and a bold translation of Euripides's classic work, Medea (Free Press), in 2008. Medea was staged in the Dublin Fringe Festival and broadcast on RTÉ radio, with Bríd Brennan as Medea and Barry McGovern as Jason. Robertson also compiled and edited Mortification: Writers’ Stories of their Public Shame (Fourth Estate, 2003). In 2004 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
About THE WRECKING LIGHT (2011)"There's an oneiric charge and intensity to many of these poems that builds to a fabular clarity of thought, which is at once precise in its particularity and placeless. Whether in his extraordinarily fresh renderings of Ovid or his own imaginings, Robertson's lines have the luminosity of myth. The Wrecking Light is a work of extraordinary visionary power, its music bleak and beautiful, spare and unsparing. If there were justice in the world, it would win every prize going." —The Guardian
Robin Robertson’s fourth collection is, if anything, an even more moving, bleakly lyrical, and at times shocking book than Swithering, winner of the Forward Prize. Alongside deft translations from Neruda and Montale, and dynamic—at times horrific—retellings of stories from Ovid, the poems in The Wrecking Light pitch the power and wonder of nature against the frailty and failure of the human, their utter seriousness leavened by a wry, dry and disarming humour. Ghosts sift through these poems; certainties become volatile, and the simplest situations thicken with strangeness and threat. All of these poems are haunted by the presence and pressure of the primitive world against our own, and are written with the kind of dream-like intensity of description that has become Robertson’s trademark. The Wrecking Light is a book of considerable grandeur and sweep from one of the most powerful poets at work today.
About SWITHERING (2006)
‘What a marvel the volume is…[Swithering] displays admirably Robertson’s genius for exact and gorgeous imagery, his dazzling metaphorical gift, and the knottiness of his thinking which runs through the syntax like a bead of Metaphysical quicksilver. But it is above all his firm grasp of the way in which language works that gives his poetry its authority and classical poise. Few poets at work now have his unerring control of the line…the poems teem with images and metaphors that give the chime of a struck glass.’ –John Banville, New York Review of Books
To "swither" means to suffer indecision or doubt, but there is no faltering in these poems; any uncertainty is not in the line or the sound or the image, but only in the themes of flux and change and transformation that thread through this powerful third collection. Robin Robertson has written a book of remarkable cohesion and range that calls on his knowledge of folklore and myth to fuse the old ways with the new. From raw, exposed poems about the end of childhood to erotically charged lyrics about the ends of desire, from a brilliant re-telling of the metamorphosis and death of Actaeon to the final freeing of the waters in “Holding Proteus,” these are close examinations of nature—of the bright epiphanies of passion and loss. At times somber, at times exultant, Robertson's poems are always firmly rooted in the world we see, the life we experience: original, precise, and startlingly clear.
About MEDEA (2008)
"The purpose of translation is to set a play free. This is just what Robin Robertson does. In his lucid, free-running verse, Medea's power is released into the world, fresh and appalling, in words that seem spoken for the first time." —Anne Enright
Medea has been betrayed. Her husband Jason has left her for a younger woman. He has forgotten all the promises he made and is even prepared to abandon their two sons. But Medea is not a woman to accept such disrespect passively. Strong-willed and fiercely intelligent, she turns her formidable energies to working out the greatest, and most horrifying, revenge possible....Euripides' devastating tragedy is shockingly modern in the sharp psychological exploration of the characters and the gripping interactions between them. Award-winning poet, Robin Robertson, has captured both the pace and vitality of the drama and the power and beauty of the poetry and has reinvigorated this masterpiece for the twenty-first century.
