ROBIN ROBERTSON, POET

“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. 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. A second collection, Slow Air, appeared in 2002. His poetry appears regularly in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement. He recently 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.  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. He is the first poet to have won both the Best First Collection and the Best Collection prize.

ABOUT MEDEA (2008)
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.

ABOUT SWITHERING
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. 

‘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

“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 

“‘Wedding the Locksmith’s Daughter’ is an object lesson in necessity and economy in poetry: Robertson’s intelligence compulsively welds to every possible meaning in a noun or an act, in this case the wedding of key to lock, of sound to sense, of man to woman.” —Gillian Pachter, Daily Telegraph