Robin Robertson

Grimoire

Stories, 2020

Like some lost chapters from the Celtic folk tradition, Grimoire tells stories of ordinary people caught up, suddenly, in the extraordinary: tales of violence, madness and retribution, of second sight, witches, ghosts, selkies, changelings and doubles, all bound within a larger mythology, narrated by a doomed shape-changer – a man, beast or god.

A grimoire is a manual for invoking spirits. Here, Robin Robertson and his brother Tim Robertson – whose accompanying images are as unforgettable as cave-paintings – raise strange new forms which speak not only of the potency of our myths and superstitions, but how they were used to balance and explain the world and its predicaments.

From one of our most powerful lyric poets, this is a book of curses and visions, gifts both desired and unwelcome, characters on the cusp of their transformation – whether women seeking revenge or saving their broken children, or men trying to save themselves. Haunting and elemental, Grimoire is full of the same charged beauty as the Scottish landscape – a beauty that can switch, with a mere change in the weather, to hostility and terror.

The Long Take

Poetry/Fiction, 2018

“An inter-genre tour de force, The Long Take is a restless reimagining of conventional poetics. With syncopated rhythms, staccato dialogue and jump-scenes, the book weaves dizzying, jazz-like meditations on PTSD, masculinity, betrayal and salvation by embodying, in sound, scent and sixth-sense, one of America’s most hopeful and devastating decades. The result is a ravishing achievement.” –Ocean Vuong

Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can’t return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but – as those dark, classic movies made clear – the country needed outsiders to study and dramatise its new anxieties. While Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties, riven by social and racial division, spiralling corruption and the collapse of the inner cities. The Long Take is about a good man, brutalised by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it – yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself. —Man Booker Prize

Sailing the Forest

Poetry, 2014

“Robin Robertson’s bracing book offers a host of pleasures: rich and briny atmospheres, the burr and bristle of a fine ear, an eye restless for exact and searing detail. But the greatest of these is watching a writer come into his own, in poems increasingly compelling and large in their embrace, their dark and lustrous landscapes fully inhabited, fully haunted.”  —Mark Doty

Sailing the Forest selects from the finest work of one of the most essential voices in contemporary poetry. Robin Robertson’s verse is at once haunted and haunting, beautiful and brutal, ancient and immediate, and capable of tricking ghosts from the most apparently innocuous and familiar shadows. His unique, mythically charged world is a place of forked storms, where “Rain…is silence turned up high” and we can see “the hay marry the fire / and the fire walk.” Through five remarkable collections, Robertson has captured the illusory and intangible in language of sensuous physicality. Sailing the Forest is the definitive introduction to a poet at the very height of his talents.

BACCHAE 

Translation, 2014

“Robin Robertson is the great Euripides translator of our time. The clarity and power of his Medea is unmatched, and his Bacchae is just as direct, unhindered and fluid, perfect for revealing such madness.” —David Vann

A new god has come to Thebes, Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, and the women are streaming out of the city to worship him on the mountain, drinking and dancing in wild Bacchic frenzy. The king, Pentheus, is furious, denouncing this so-called ‘god’ as a charlatan, but no mortal can deny a god and no man can ever stand against Dionysus. How the god exacts his terrible revenge, drawing Pentheus to his own destruction, is as devastating now as it was in the fifth century BC. This stunning translation, by award-winning poet Robin Robertson, reinvigorates Euripides’ masterpiece for contemporary readers, bringing the ancient verse to fervid, brutal life.

Hill of Doors

Poetry, 2013

“Robertson is a superstar of Scottish poetry.” —Guardian

Charged with strangeness and beauty, Hill of Doors is a haunted and haunting book, where each successive poem seems a shape conjured from the shadows, and where the uncanny is made physically present. The collection sees the return of some familiar members of the Robertson company, including Strindberg—“heading, as usual, towards calamity—and the shape-shifter, Dionysus. Four loose retellings of stories of the Greek god form pillars for the book, alongside four short Ovid versions. Threaded through these are a series of pieces about the poet’s childhood on the Northeast coast, his fascination with the sea and the islands of Scotland. However, the reader will also discover a distinct new note in Robertson’s austere but ravishing poetry: towards the possibility of contentment—“a house, a door, a key”—finding, at last, a “happiness of the hand and heart.” Magisterial in its command and range, indelibly moving and memorable in its speech, Hill of Doors is Robin Robertson’s most powerful book to date.

The Wrecking Light

Poetry, 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.” —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.

MEDEA

Translation, 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.

Swithering

Poetry, 2006

“Compellingly terse…Robertson portrays dramatic, threatening landscapes and seascapes from Scotland, Ireland, and the north of England in gritty, tactile verse a bit like the young Heaney’s…Wringing grave warnings from confident descriptions, Robertson’s poems…render the world with force enough to make it ours.” —Stephen Burt, New York Times

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.

THE DELETED WORLD: New Versions of Tranströmer

Translation, 2006

“He has captured the tone of the oeuvre in the poem, and the work, as a whole, shows his meticulous use of language which conveys the poet’s thought subtly and faultlessly…This wonderful book has much to teach other translators in its immense concentration and daring accuracy.” —Anne Born, Swedish Book Review

Tomas Tranströmer—the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature—can be clearly recognized not just as Sweden’s most important poet, but as a writer of international stature whose work speaks to us now with undiminished clarity and resonance. Long celebrated as a master of the arresting, suggestive image, Tranströmer is a poet of the liminal: drawn again and again to thresholds of light and of water, the boundaries between man and nature, wakefulness, and dream. A deeply spiritual but secular writer, his skepticism about humanity is continually challenged by the implacable renewing power of the natural world. His poems are epiphanies rooted in experience: spare, luminous meditations that his extraordinary images split open—exposing something sudden, mysterious, and unforgettable. As Stephanie Burt said of these free English versions, “The Deleted World is a fine introduction to a poet whose work will endure, and who sounds good—as so many poets cannot—in a language not his own.”