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Biographical note:  Adam Piette is a Professor at the University of Sheffield, author of Remembering and the Sound of Words and Imagination at War. His current project concentrates on Cold War culture. He is Reviews Editor for The European Journal of English Studies, contributes a poetry section to The Reader, guest-edited a special issue of Translation and Literature on modernism and translation and helped set up the Edwin Morgan Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.

Biographical note:  Katy Price teaches English and Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. She is writing a book about astronomy in William Empsons's love poetry. She writes poetry and is studying creative music technology.

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EAN13:  9781844712441
ISBN:  9781844712441
Author:  Adam Piette
Title:  The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson
Series:  Salt Companions to Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  17-May-07
Extent:  276pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  16 mm
Weight:  414 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  With eight superb collections of poems as well as a Carcanet Selected, editor of the important Cambridge school journal Perfect Bound in the 1970s, author of three monographs on twentieth century poetry and several collections of translations, Peter Robinson is a major poet unjustly marginalized by circumstances. Robinson's poetry is subtle, penetrating and alert in its depth and breadth: capable of meticulous, expansive cultural critique as well as moving attention to difficult, ‘ordinary’ life experiences. The febrile fields in which the work operates – poetry of the North, 1970s avant-garde, Cambridge school, engagement with art and postwar culture, poetry about Italy/Europe, Japan and travel poetry of ‘abroad', poetry of intense domestic relational crisis, hospital texts and fatherhood poems – are complemented by critical interrogation of the responsibilities and ethics of poetry in the twentieth century as well as the championing of European poets in the translation enterprises. It is because the work is so complexly ‘non-aligned’ and hard to place on the cultural map of contemporary poetry that we are sure that the volume will be a rewarding and stimulating companion to this excellent poet.

Table of contents:
Adam Piette and Katy Price: Peter Robinson's Tokens of Affection: An Introduction
Roy Fisher: Preface
SPACE
Adrian Poole: Robinson's Roads
Paul Hullah: ‘Put In My Place': Arrangement of Self and World in Peter Robinson's Early Poems
POETRY VS. CRITICAL PROSE
Eric Griffiths: Blanks, misgivings, fallings from us
Steve Clark: ‘How I can't but wish you well': Elegiac and Paternal Utterance in the Poetry of Peter Robinson
REPARATION
David Pascoe: The Rough with the Smooth: Peter Robinson, Adrian Stokes, and the Forms of Reparation
Jane Davis: Reading in Reality: A Reading of ‘There Again’ by Members of Ridgeway Library Reading Group
Adam Piette: Cold War Conflicts in Peter Robinson's Poetry
Andrew Fitzsimons: ‘The Great Friend': Peter Robinson and Translation
HOME AND ABROAD
Ralph Pite: Avenues / Returns: Peter Robinson and Liverpool
John Roe: The Refracted Self: Japanese Experiences
Miki Iwata: His Other Islands: Peter Robinson, Languages, Traditions
Arts of the Eye and Ear
Neil Corcoran: Chance and Circumstance: Painting in Peter Robinson's Poems
Katy Price: Peter Robinson, What Are You Trying to Prove?
David Taylor: Background Noise
Peter Robinson: A Bibliography, 1976-2006
List of Contributors

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Peter Robinson’s Tokens of Affection: An Introduction
by Adam Piette and Katy Price

Peter Robinson’s poetry has both force and light complexity, the poems charged with encounter, testimony and the possibility of overcoming failures in communication or feeling. The poems, discrete and subtle, argue for the importance of our daily situatedness in the world as the manner in which we exist as citizens, both individually and collectively. They also argue for the importance of poetry as a mode of the imagination in writing which can stage forms of sympathy within, and active working through of, private-public experiences across all kinds of divide. The poems address us intimately, call up quiet and necessary reserves of feeling in the reader, and try to sustain fidelity to a culture of common understanding.

Peter Robinson’s poetry is remarkable for its sensitive monitoring of local pressure points, acting as a sophisticated sensor of the emotional storm systems, accumulations and vortices occurring in lived occasions. He is a poet who holds to his fidelity to poetry as a special form of agency in the world as it is happening to him as a citizen on his way through and in the world. The style of his writing is to condense into core speech acts annotations on real events and experiences in his life, working them into transformed language on the page, always to an addressee, true in its engagement with the voices of others, alive to the sensations and temptations of a series of moments occurring in language, and slightly beyond language too. Robinson would agree with Goethe when he wrote in his old age: ‘All my poetry is occasional, provoked by reality: it is thus earthed, has foundations’. Our cover photograph speaks to this commitment, picking up the connection between masonry and the texture of the built environment which David Pascoe elaborates in his essay on Robinson and Adrian Stokes.

Eldest son of an Anglican vicar, brought up in parishes in the poorer districts of Liverpool, Robinson lived as a child in the neighbourhood of Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields. He absorbed some of the energy and experimental razzmatazz of the city in the 1960s, the pop poetry of Adrian Henry in particular, and his earliest writing was consciously in imitation of the Beat-inspired Liverpudlian forms that were buzzing round the city then. His first poems date from post-68 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia – reading Robinson from the 1960s to the present day is a story too of a citizen’s journey through Cold War and beyond.

One of the surviving poems of this period, ‘How He Changes’, conjures up a walking persona disinvesting himself as he walks through Liverpool, of all his acquaintance, allowing the curve of the road and of the free verse to move him out of their sight and grasp ‘right out of view’ towards a new life: ‘the sky like a blank drawing board / stands out, indifferently blue.’ (Selected Poems, p. 20) Already we can see here some of the coordinates of Robinson’s poetic: poetry on the move, under suburban skies, through cities, towards uncertain futures, blank, indifferent, disturbing, the poet trying to come to terms with the other people encountered on the journey, through troubled observation of the details seen and registered with piercing, nervy eye. Typically, the poem is charged with translatory encounters and encounters with other poets’ work too: ‘How He Changes’ elaborates on an actual translation of Pierre Reverdy’s ‘Comme on change’, and nods in the direction of Kenneth Rexroth’s cubist poetry, with allusions to Ferlinghetti’s ‘Pictures of the Gone World’. The intimate searching voice so characteristically Robinsonian is also growing out of this surrealist-Beat scene.

Liverpool was a city alive in other ways too – brimming with energy in the fields of music and art, at the same time as it was a metropolis undergoing the changes wrought on the UK by the Suez crisis – the aftermath of Suez rolls through the experiences of his generation and thus enters into the cultural landscapes conjured by the lines of poetry – power-lines registering the shock waves of Cold War readjustments, not least in the downgrading of Liverpool from Second City of the British Empire to post-industrial waste land. At school Robinson read the complete works of Joyce (including Finnegans Wake) and discovered a style he wanted in Dubliners, a book about a city not very different, in mood and atmosphere, from the Liverpool of the 1970s. Unemployment hit the city hard and the deep scars wrought on the minds and bodies of the people of the Northern towns are captured in unnerving, subtle and unsettlingly floaty close observation in the collection Benefit Forms (1978). Mass emigration from the city cut deep into Liverpool too in the 1980s – the ruthless economic culture of the decade divided the UK in two as never before, forcing each and every citizen to choose their camp, a mind-breaking civil war of words and suffering. Robinson’s poems chart these changes, suffer them along the lines, watch and wait and take hold of what can be understood between those whom the times broke down. They choose to set up camp with those who moved along the way – again Joyce’s exile in Italy seemed to beckon as exemplary for the times. The conductor Simon Rattle was at school with Robinson at Liverpool College – ending up at head of the Berlin Philharmonic. At some stage during his school years, Robinson knew he too would have to leave. ‘How He Changes’ was written in London in the summer of 1975 and initiates the key topic of departure and leave-taking in Robinson’s poetry.

The city writing and poetry of unemployment were vital for his public life as a poet in the 1970s. He graduated from York University in 1974 – his supervisor there was Nicole Ward Jouve, who was married to the novelist Anthony Ward – who had edited Prospect along with Elaine Feinstein and Jeremy Prynne. As Robinson recalled in interview with Nate Dorward:

[Anthony Ward] knew Elaine Feinstein, Jeremy Prynne, and Andrew Crozier, and lent me copies of books by the first two. They were all Donald Davie students, and I got pointed in the direction of the Black Mountain poets and the Objectivists, so I arrived in Cambridge having read American long poems, Zukofsky, Olson, Dorn, Creeley, as well as Prynne’s books up to and including Brass, and plenty more besides. I’d also read some of what were the Fulcrum Press poets, and been most taken with Bunting and Fisher. Because I grew up in the North of England – my father’s family in the cities of the Midlands and North West, my mother’s from Tyneside with some Scottish relatives – I didn’t find it difficult to think of them as poets who were making sense of my particular background. (‘The Life of a Little Magazine’)

He moved on to Cambridge to do graduate work and there he linked up with the first formation of the Cambridge School, editing the poetry magazine Perfect Bound and helping organize several Cambridge International Poetry Festivals. Perfect Bound published J.H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier, John Wilkinson, Geoff Ward, Tom Raworth, Rod Mengham, Christopher Middleton, Gael Turnbull, Peter Riley, Tim Dooley, Douglas Oliver, Wendy Mulford, Iain Sinclair, Allen Fisher and Marcus Perryman, among others. The 1979 festival was run by Robinson and Alison Rimmer and had a big Saturday Night event with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and Kenneth Koch. The interview gives some tantalizing details:

Ginsberg did the whole thing for a tiny fee plus flights on to his next festival. The idea was to present the widest range of poetries so as to attract as many constituencies as possible. There was an afternoon of Sound Poetry, a debate between Silkin and Davie about poetry and politics, big readings by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Joseph Brodsky, Edmond Jabès with Rosemary Waldrop translating, Michael Hamburger talking about Celan with an exhibition of his French wife’s etchings …

A very public spat with John Wilkinson over innovative poetry and class ended Robinson’s relations with the Cambridge School and he moved on to other things. The argument centered round a long broadside addressed to Wilkinson, published by the Many Press, ‘Going Out to Vote’, which ends with the tendentious line, ‘My word, but you do go on.’ The line, Robinson swears, is also clearly self-referential, as the poem is very long, but it stung Wilkinson and marked the essential difference between Robinson and the members of the School. In interview, Robinson has argued that the poem is about essential problems facing any young poet in the 1970s:

‘Going Out to Vote’ is a survey of the territory of such a poet’s relationship to social, cultural and historical knowledge: who sponsors this figure? what relation does this poet have to inherited wealth? from where does the special access to insight derive? who was he, or less often she, addressing? what use is a poem’s apparent moral or political correctness in lived historical situations? (‘The Life of a Little Magazine’)

Still, the impression left is that of Robinson quitting the School because he preferred to move towards formalist choices. He has been accused of going mainstream – but the poverty and difficulties Robinson suffered from the 1970s on are an obvious rejoinder, as is the fact that the mainstream, as managed by London poets, has also preferred to marginalize poets like Robinson who operate athwart the categories and affiliations that publishers and reading communities so often rely on in their navigation of contemporary work.

Whilst still at Cambridge, Robinson carried on with his work for the Festival and co-edited Numbers, a review dedicated to poets discovered through translation, like Vittorio Sereni and Györgi Petri, and poets closer in spirit to Robinson’s plain style: Douglas Dunn, Charles Tomlinson, Roy Fisher. He also worked to sustain the reputation of Geoffrey Hill, a poet unjustly marginalized too, especially by the sniffiness of Motion and Morrison’s Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry. The collection of essays edited by Robinson resulted in a memorable battle of the books in the letters pages of the LRB, launched by Tom Paulin’s review which had zeroed in on Hill’s so-called ‘cthonic’ visionary nationalism, accusing him of being a political reactionary wallowing in imperialist Victoriana. Hill himself got understandably upset but, less understandably, seemed angry at Robinson himself – the affair served to sever Robinson’s links with the other Cambridge School, associated with emotional close reading after the example of Christopher Ricks.

It was also during this period that Robinson consolidated the interest that complements his northern city angles – his attachment to the poet he considers as mentor, Roy Fisher. Roy Fisher’s attention to Birmingham, his avant-garde poetry and visionary-pragmatic denotation of the industrial city’s rise and fall, with its shifting inscapes and energies, have all influenced Robinson’s work. The debt was repaid in the two books on Fisher’s work which Robinson co-edited in 2000, News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher, edited with Robert Sheppard and The Thing about Roy Fisher: Critical Studies, edited with John Kerrigan.

Robinson’s poems are not exclusively concerned with the city and his own movement through urban communities – a sizeable proportion, like the early poems ‘Autobiography’ and ‘Dirty Language’, deal with delicate candour and formal refinement with the harsh twists of perspective that make up difficult relationships. The distorted features of the suffering face glimpsed in the kettle, the strange imagining of emotional bonds experienced from false perspectives: the poems explore the interstices of feelings in a situation, self-consciousness gone slightly wrong between two hearts and minds. They read as eerily anticipatory of the terrible event that occurred in Italy in September 1975. Seven poems concern the traumatic event, the rape of Robinson’s first wife (then girlfriend) at gun-point whilst Robinson was forced to watch. The poems have to be read and no commentary can do more than simply say that. Suffice it to say that the event broke the relationship. It also traumatized Robinson, forcing out poems of reparation and attempted understanding which know they must fail – testimonial writing that continues to inflect so many other poems written after 1975, like a shadow.

They are shadowed too by Robinson’s knowledge and exploration of the psychoanalytic inflections of the mind, in particular Kleinian analysis. This body of knowledge has informed his intuitive thinking about relations between the genders, as well as the many family poems he has written. The concern is readable in the poetry’s uncanny grasp of fetish objects, its startlingly frank and delicate sensing of male feeling for mother, wife and children, its acknowledgement of the censoring, elaborating and sublimating processes of art and representation. Robinson’s writing on the work of Adrian Stokes, who underwent analysis with Klein, is critical evidence here, in particular in demonstrating the extent to which Robinson’s feelings about the possibility of reparation after the attack in Italy were shaped by Stokes. In his introduction to the poems, Robinson elaborated the two phases Stokes identified in any artwork – destruction of maternal image followed by reparation:

In the former stage there is an acting out of aggression, a projection onto the materials of art, as in infancy onto the mother, of images lacking integration. At the second stage, induced by the artist’s reparative need, he saw the process of art as an integrating of these tense and distorted images. In the work of integration, the artist constructs a whole object, whose articulation as a process of resolution helps confirm, or re-enact, the ego’s integration. Both these stages contribute to the experience of completed art. The former, identified with process, is an incantation of parts which compels the involvement of spectator or reader. The latter, identified with completeness, emphasizes for the reader or spectator his separateness, or conversely the art object’s wholeness, its otherness. (‘Stokes – The Poet’)

The two cycles are played out in agonizing dramas of trauma and attempted resolution in the seven poems about rape and its consequences, a terrifying incantation of parts compelling our involvement, countered by attempted acts of reparation, healing, reticent sympathies.

Sealed in to the life story too and, since the poetry is also life story, the poems, is the abiding importance of Italy to Robinson. His father had been in the Intelligence Corps in Italy, from September 1943 to the armistice, encountering, incidentally, F.T. Prince, poet of ‘Soldiers Bathing’. It was partly thorough his father’s talk, partly through the interests fostered by his study of art and literature at the University of York, that Robinson decided to visit Italy with his wife to visit the museums, with a view to doing a thesis at Cambridge on Pound and Renaissance art. The attack occurred, as the poems ‘There Again’ and ‘At Como’ indicate, not far from the outskirts of Milan, whilst Robinson and his wife were trying to hitch a lift. It is no exaggeration to say that the event gives point and scope to almost everything Robinson wrote thereafter.

As far as Pound is concerned, Robinson ended up losing patience with the American poet, growing to dislike his bric-à-brac approach and especially his decision to do propaganda for Mussolini in Rome and the Republic of Saló. Pound’s treachery is an abiding concern of Robinson’s in the ethical work on poetry in his criticism and, specifically, in the article ‘Ezra Pound: Translation and Betrayal’ in the monograph In the Circumstances: About Poetry and Poets.

Begun in the summer of 1979, the seven poems written about the rape were composed during the period in which Robinson was discovering the poetry of Vittorio Sereni, sensing there a possible antidote to the problems posed by Pound. Sereni was not free of a sense of guilt, a burden on his conscience wrought by his passivity in fascist Italy until his capture in Sicily in July 1943. Robinson’s poem ‘The Harm’ can be read as the first homage to the Milanese poet with its buried allusion to Sereni’s line from ‘Un incubo’, ‘Certo si pacciono, certo’ (‘Yes they’re enjoying themselves’) in the lines about the lovers heard through the wall (‘clearly pleasing each other’). (Selected Poems, p. 43) Sereni’s single man hears the lovers’ pleasure as torture, summoning unbearable thoughts of the war, whilst in Robinson it is the couple together who hear the other couple, the male’s ‘imperatives’ awakening ‘your distanced hurt, incorporated wrong’. The last verse of ‘A September Night’ (‘I’d just make amends’) (Selected Poems, p. 42) contains the first example of one of the principal themes of Robinson’s work: the complexity and difficulty of true reparation for such incorporated wrong, a topic dealt with movingly in the essay on Wordsworth in In the Circumstances, ‘Reparation and “The Sailor’s Mother”’.

The interest in Sereni’s work culminated in a series of translations of the Italian poems, Selected Poems of Vittorio Sereni in 1990; Robinson met Sereni, just before his death, to work on these. ‘Towards Darkness’, (Selected Poems, pp. 47-8) with its allusion to Sereni’s ‘La malattia dell’uomo’ (‘Guidami tu, stella variabile, fin che puoi’) is based on memories of the second meeting, and takes the form of an elegy for the master of the Linea Lombarda:

With your gratitude and reticence,
through obscured exits, guide me
further than exchanged stilted phrases,
before you enter the collected dark –

The dark of death, imagined as survival only in some imagined future Collected Poems, can be countered by the charm of collaboration (the translations), of sensed similarities (Robinson’s poetry of reticence allying itself to Sereni’s), of companionship and mentorship through a troubled century. If the times are marked by cycles of violence and reparation generating poetic response, then Sereni has acted as a true guide through an almost impossible set of circumstances.

The last meeting between the poets took place in April 1982, just as the Falklands War was brewing on the horizon, and it is an indication of the reticent activism of Robinson’s craft that resistance to that war should take the delicate form it does take in the poem ‘News Abroad’. (Selected Poems, pp. 46-7) Written at twenty-nine, the poem is richly allusive, confident with the baggage of its cultural network: it is dedicated to Tim Dooley backing the subdued allusion to his ‘Above Genoa’; the kiosks ‘prophesying war’ echo Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ – newspaper propagandists are contemporary culture’s ancestral voices. ‘From square to square’ alludes to Robinson’s own translation of Sereni’s ‘Saba’ (‘da una piazza all’altra’); ‘supertanker’ remembers Montale’s ‘petroliera’ in ‘Casa dei doganieri’ – Robinson’s poem takes place at La Spezia on the Ligurian coast where Montale spent his summer holidays, celebrated in his Ossa di Seppia. Montale’s poem addresses a dead lover lost beyond recall – her spirit seems fitfully to inhabit the lights of a tanker glimpsed on the horizon. The news of the distant war in ‘News Abroad’ escapes comprehension too, vanishing like the profile of the supertanker ‘into lowering mist’. Political events have the elusive quality of the dead, for Robinson – his poetry is haunted, always, by the reticent ghosts of current events, intuited beyond the horizon as though in some Cold War sublime. Elusive but real too, since the wars of the Cold War, though occurring beyond the horizons of the West, are real enough; their influence is felt in Robinson’s poem in the seagulls ‘in close formation’ like the pilots bombing the Falklands, ‘souls of the deceased that swoop and glide’. The last line of the poem cites Pound’s famous definition: poetry is ‘news that stays news’. Poetry has a rival in the Cold War’s current events, marginalizing poets and poems by stealing the thunder of sublime mystery and elusive power: ‘news staying news though I don’t understand.’ If Sereni was of any guidance at all, he should guide readers of Robinson’s work towards comprehension of the strategic uses of reticence as political symptom in the poems. Robinson is playing out the poet’s marginalization in his political poems, elucidating the real loss of citizen agency in postwar forms of governance.

As with the companion poems ‘Nabucco’ and ‘Die Lilliputbahn’, the Sereni-inspired poetry from Italy draws the topic of reparation from its private realm into the zone of history. The poems rethink the relations of the UK to the rest of the world, ponder the harsh realities of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, as in the 20th section of ‘Via Sauro Variations’ (Selected Poems, p. 111) – ‘homeless from the nearby civil war’ – and weigh the ever present burden of the Second World War and the concentration camps on postwar imaginations. ‘Nabucco’ (Selected Poems, pp. 73-4) is symptomatically powerless before the sense of doomed association it imagines between the spectacle of exiled Jews in Verdi’s opera at a performance in Verona and the news from Beirut, ‘dead faces in a war zone’ from ‘a shelled walled city’, replaying the horrors of the 1940s. ‘Die Lilliputbahn’ (Selected Poems, pp. 116-7) stages Vienna not as a tourist Cold War destination (the Prater wheel from The Third Man), but in terms of the quiet of the park’s station platform – Robinson is himself quiet as to what occurred at stations in Vienna, reticence matching the invisible elusive ghosts of the dead passengers of all those trains (‘a train’s / going in mist with an echo of voices’). Our own sense of hauntedness is inextricably involved with the trauma of the Shoah, echoing especially within our own private silences.

This is as much as to say that Robinson’s poetry, though playing possum to the loud strains of politics and history, is political in the very ways it summons its privacies into lines of force, feeling and circumstance. Netted across the collections of poems are sensed relations between emotional forms of betrayal, passivity and anguished desire and political and historical cruces of difficult judgement, as in Pound’s betrayal at Saló, or Sereni’s working through his own passivity in the Algerian camps and poems. The public poems shadow the private lyrics therefore in subtle and disturbing ways. The poem ‘Unfaithful Translations’, (Selected Poems, p. 57) for instance, looks to Sereni again as guide, but here in the difficult zone of infidelity – Robinson’s second wife is Italian from Parma. Robinson’s translation work is fused with this new relationship, Sereni’s words like the carp in the waters, but which also figure her words to him, offering future joy, the promise of ‘body, voice, touch’ despite the watery disturbances of the treacherous medium of languages, and the tricky waters of infidelity on the tongue. Metaphors between language-use and intimacy implicate Robinson’s readers in the performance of translated relationships, an involvement made especially clear in the opening poems to Lost and Found (1997) and About Time Too (2001). The speaker of ‘Difficult Mornings’ struggles to ‘revise, / revise a voice into other people’s prose / as if it were coaxing a weary lover’, while at the conclusion of ‘A Dedication’ he promises, across down a long-distance telephone connection, to ‘say / words of explanation and launch them on the air’.

The theme and its treatment is revisited in ‘Via Sauro Variations’, imitating Sereni’s Mottetti (translated by Robinson in Modern Poetry in Translation) and Spenser’s Amoretti. The twenty-five sections, like musical variations, are woven together into a modern Petrarchan sequence dedicated to his new Laura, in poetry that imagines the act of translation as communication between temporarily estranged lovers: ‘desire, abandoned, still great, / to approach and reach near // an original, translate distances / in the miscarriaged language we say.’ (Selected Poems, p. 105) The spaces and distances of the form, the stanza break, the line-ending space, are emblems of the distances that separate languages and different minds, however close. But they also figure possible companionate spaces, the zone of shared breath and desire. This double attitude to form owes something to the Cambridge tradition of close reading, but also to the example of the Italian poets Robinson admires, Montale, Saba, Fortini, Sereni above all.

The 1980s proved to be a difficult decade for Robinson, as for so many. Thatcher had begun her Kulturkampf in 1981 against the universities, and jobs in the academy became scarce, especially for specialists in contemporary poetry. The situation is treated in the Entertaining Fates collection (1992): the stifling socio-political atmosphere likened to a Tennysonian ‘overgrown spinney’, where the ‘ivy chokes its mildewed boughs / and interthreads hard earth’ in the poem ‘Not Yet Out of the Wood’. (Selected Poems, p. 53) The wood in question figures the selva of poetry, the garden of matrimonial life, or the UK – in all three dimensions, the question ‘do I wait or go?’ is a compound of economic, sexual and cultural compulsions and desires. Robinson’s persona has to choose to leave or stay, an Empsonian choice between the ‘blankness’ of a ‘financially embarrassed’ life as a part-time lover/poet/worker, or the lure of enforced emigration, the modernist dream of deracinated intelligence and sexual nomadism.

The departure did happen, but not as originally planned – Robinson left the UK in 1989 for Japan to take up a post as professor of English. Very soon after, the relationship with his Italian wife Ornella began – and the extraordinary intertwining of Japanese and Italian material in the poems began too. The move so far abroad also initiated a significant change in style. If we look at two representative poems written soon after the move – ‘An Undetermined Heart’ and ‘Lost Objects’ – the new style becomes apparent. In both poems, the fresh new mode sings out: a more musical play of words, a lighter, clearer representation of the social and natural world, enriched by what one might call an ecological and anthropological conscience. ‘An Undetermined Heart’ negotiates the new culture of Japanese politesse and hospitality with an open mind, yet takes succour from the resemblances between the bare and oppressive domestic spaces of Japan and his childhood memories of displacement from vicarage to vicarage, despite the gulf separating expectations and emotional circumstance. Similar cross-cultural wit is generated in ‘Lost Objects’ which examines the kindly custom the Japanese have to hang lost objects in full view if found by someone else; the custom raises all the psychoanalytic ghosts Robinson struggled with in the UK, as well as enacting a charming replay of the Mallarmé prose poem ‘Le Démon de l’Analogie’ which ends with the poet seeing himself reflected in a shop window displaying a lyre with wings: ‘Wordless in front of the next / lost property office’s window, / you find yourself looking perplexed.’ (Selected Poems, p. 70) The light, clear style also signals a release of comic energy in the poems, here in the soft-spoken joke about homelessness, voicelessness in a foreign culture, the perplexed self of the psychoanalytic Cogito, related to doubts about the survival of love in the Japanese city and suburbs.

Such survival became all the more critical within the writing after the other extraordinary violent event which has shaped Robinson’s life: the brain tumour and operation he went through in 1993. It was a benign tumour and the operation was successful, but it was an extremely dangerous procedure, and Robinson suffered deafness in one ear, a weeping tear duct and semi-paralysis on parts of the face. The episode was as close to a brush with death as a normal creature goes through without going under and its effects are given expression in the three poems, ‘Before an Operation’, ‘A Burning Head’ and ‘Convalescent Days’. The poems are about the possible ministrations of poetry as daily meditation, as acts of communication and self-restoration against the shocks of the body under siege. In their quiet steadiness of nerve and their ways of attending to others, friends, family, fellow-sufferers under circumstances of fear, they are a serious contribution to a literature of care and near-death, read movingly in comparison to similar projects in the 1990s (Thom Gunn, Jim Ferris, Susan Wicks).

The move to Japan sharpened Robinson’s sense of himself as a poet of travel, of departures and returns, as explorer of the flight paths and transit spaces of the modern world. The travel motif enables a range of different kinds of observation on the passing world: nostalgic returns to the North in poems like ‘Your Other Country’ (Selected Poems, pp. 114-5) addressed both to Ornella and to his own lost boy self (‘Love, this is your other country’); returns to emotional trauma in ‘Scargill House’ – which is a twelve-section poem about meeting his first wife, Rosemary Laxton, again – and ‘The Happiness Plant’; exploration of the past economic conditions which led to exile in the first place (‘Red Wednesday’); even nostalgia being manufactured for Italy itself, a country married into and second home, in ‘Nostalgia for the Present’; also pure transit poems, poetry of airports and departure lounges (‘Leaving Sapporo’ and ‘Something to Declare’). As he has said in interview:

The great advantage of ‘exile’ for a writer, or, more strictly in my case, economic migration, is that you are freed at a stroke from the innumerable ways in which a native culture sets the agenda and delineates the pale of thought and feeling. It does this so thoroughly that it’s only when you’ve got clear of it that you begin to see how much you’ve been shaped. Perhaps the greatest supposed danger is that you lose touch with your native tongue. Frankly, I think that’s a parochial anxiety. I teach Literature in English, and English as a Second Language. I watch the different European and American news broadcasts by satellite at breakfast each morning. I’m in e-mail, fax, and phone contact with relatives, friends, and colleagues in most of the English-speaking countries and Europe. We live in the fragmentary, poly-lingual foreign community here, where the native Englishes are as likely to be American, Canadian, Australian, or New Zealander as the various UK versions.
(‘The Poetry Kit Interviews Peter Robinson’)


In Japan, the city Robinson worked longest in was Sendai, and it is Sendai which gave Robinson one of his strangest of trouvailles. For Sendai happens to be where Jasper Johns was stationed during the Korean War. The vision of a coat hanger in a tree in the poem ‘Coat Hangar’ summons Johns’ artwork, which itself, in Robinson’s extraordinarily subtle allusive style, brings on so much else. As he put it in interview, in a passage which might indicate some of the light complexity of his learning:

Williams’ poem [‘A Red Wheelbarrow’] is directly alluded to – but where he has ‘so much depends’, I have ‘so much else that could depend’; and I also had in mind that wonderful list and shrug at the end of Baudelaire’s ‘Le Cygne’. His is a poem about exile and change and survival, and so, in a different key, is mine. … Frank O’Hara’s ‘loneliness’ on his destroyer in Miyagi Bay, off Sendai, in August 1945, Johns here during Korea painting posters warning GIs about VD, and me in the same place without my wife and family in 1997 … There are images of body parts emerging from foliage ‘like a phantom limb’ also borrowed from other paintings by Johns. The poem hints at affective disturbances, the substitution of objects for feelings, disorientations caused by losses of emotional target, and behind them wars and occupations, and the survivals of customs for coping with crisis … I think of it as a reprise of themes and ways of working that I stumbled on with ‘The Yellow Tank’ six years before. Those two slightly uncharacteristic poems explore their themes in a way that seeks to replace obsession with objects by attachment to people, or to achieve attachment by working through obsession. If you think of the poems as objects too, then there’s your trajectory towards the sponsorship of understanding relations. (‘Left to their own devices’, Talk About Poetry, p. 119)

The poem is about the relationship between Johns and O’Hara – especially Johns’ ‘In Memory of my Feelings’, the artwork Johns produced for the memorial folder after O’Hara’s death based on his poem of the same title. Robinson’s poem is one of a series that sustain his interest in art and art history, ekphrastic poems that explore the common ground and differences between the two rival forms of representation and imaging. Common to Robinson, O’Hara and Johns in this case is the comparable ‘loneliness’ within the Japanese city space, emotional data conjoining the three chronotopes, Second World War, Korean War and late 1990s Sendai, but also technical conjunctions between O’Hara’s painterly personism and quotidian poetry, Johns’ symptomatic Cold War obsessional art (all those disembodied members, those targets), and Robinson’s poetry of distances, trauma and solitary dailiness. The poem stages a dream of magical resolution of obsessions, discovering a sustaining form of life, a transformative means of survival, a living with the past partner despite long distances. A great deal depends (as in hangs) on that absurd hanger in the trees …

In the notes to Anywhere You Like (2000), a collection published in Japan, Robinson has written:

During the period in which these poems were written, I have grown more used to the idea that I’m now living in three different places: Japan, where I work; Italy, where my wife’s family live; and England, where I was born. Of course, this is a state of mind, rather than a material fact; but it is one which new means of rapid communication and the relative ease of long-distance travel have made seem natural. These three countries, with which I am directly involved, have very distinct languages and cultures. The poems collected here respond variously to these places and, naturally enough, to the histories of my relations with them.

A representative poem from the collection, ‘Winter Zoo Encounter’, takes off from a chance encounter with a Florentine at the zoo to explore the life and culture of the three countries. It also imagines sympathy with the caged animals with new ecological inflections important to the later Robinson. Something about trapped states beyond native language, related to the transitional and exilic states of being which Elizabeth Bowen summed up as ‘air-mindedness’ (the mind set generated by the relative ease of long-distance travel), and to the ecological anxieties of the twenty-first century, are coming together in the Japanese poems in ways from which their seeming directness and communicability might deflect attention. But the poems are also reflecting on love and language and estranging relationships with force and light complexity that links up to Robinson’s whole life’s work.

In poems like ‘Pasta-Making’, ‘Closure’, ‘Stranded’ and ‘Italian Poplars’, the poet, whether conjuring a portrait of his wife superimposed on a Degas painting, or ironically comparing a moment of loneliness to the strandedness of Robinson Crusoe, remembers that in his actual life, confected by force of will out of culture shock and hybrid experience, true value in love and friendship is discovered. And that the things loved, whether they be person, artwork, object or place, are more vital than ever for the survival of the species as well as of the self: so much depends on such lasting tokens of affection.

Throughout his career, too, Robinson has been a tireless and dedicated prose writer, mainly of academic monographs on twentieth century poetry, but there are also: an unpublished novel, an edition of the poems of Adrian Stokes, a collection of essays on Geoffrey Hill, a co-edited collection on Roy Fisher, an unpublished work on representations of rape, and the fine collection of aphorisms published by Salt. The critical writing is keen and acute and deals with key Robinsonian concerns as a poet in the world – they explore questions of reparation (In the Circumstances), of speech act (Poetry, Poets, Readers), of situatedness within circumstances private and political (Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situation), of ethical and non-passive agency – Poetry, Poets, Readers is subtitled ‘Making Things Happen’. Poetry, Robinson would argue, acts according to an informal promissory relationship between poets, poems and readers whereby both reader and poet promise to experience concrete acts of feeling and judgement in the language zone of art in order to allow the poem to perform its real and pretended speech acts. (Poetry, Poets, Readers, p. vi) Only by taking just such an ethical step into agency can poetry survive the scepticism of the modern world. And only by abiding by the ordinary responsibilities and risks of such informally contractual agency can poetry be said to offer reparation for past harm.

If Robinson’s poetry is so engaged with the reparative ethics of the ordinary dailiness of English language use, then this is what has made his career in Japan such an odd and serious test and why the poems must undergo the motion sickness of their own travelling through sequences of homecoming, departure and exile. It is with a certain happy closure, then, that Robinson recently accepted a Chair at the University of Reading, and at the time of going to press is preparing to come home to England. Much of the bitterness of the economic fate of so many poets from the 1970s on has been harshest for poets who did genuinely attempt to sustain footholds in the academy. At long last, UK universities are recognizing, mainly through the success of creative writing programmes across the country, how valuable the teaching and research of practising poets can be within departments. Tenure at Reading for Robinson is poetic justice indeed.

Reading Robinson, finally, depends so much on a simple act of promising. As one of the aphorisms puts it: ‘My ideal reader has chosen to spend time with these words in particular’. (Untitled Deeds, p. 18) That choice once made is a form of promise, and it is a promise the very particular words of Robinson’s poems respond to with strength, delicacy and a curiously affirmative argumentative intimacy. For the lines always live in constant dialogue with their interlocutor, living with the checks and challenges of the words of the other. What Robinson wrote of Hardy’s poems can be applied to his own:

Hardy’s great poems exemplify how from the world of others’ words – which are not the poem, not Hardy’s regular art – comes the challenge, the check to that art; yet, at the same time, they demonstrate how such checks may be responded to in a poem, may become a part of the poem, and part of Hardy’s unforeseen excellence in poetry. (In the Circumstances, pp. 81-2)

These essays hope to help readers enter into the promissory zone of Robinson’s art, to help them enter too into the dialogic drama of its challenges and accorded responses, and to sense along the lines how Robinson’s interlocutory poems conjure presences and occasions from the air, incorporating existences beyond his own, inviting us, always, in to the poetry to assent, if the imagination chooses to do so, to its composed and reparative speech.

We have organized the essays, after Roy Fisher’s Preface, into sections according to the following topics: ‘Space’ (two essays on the road motif and the representations of interiors and exteriors in the poems), ‘Poetry vs. critical prose’ (two essays contrasting Robinson’s practice in his poems and in his criticism, specifically with regard to his handling of heterotonic rhyme and in the poems addressed to his children), ‘Reparation’ (four essays addressing different aspects of Robinson’s reparative art, namely the debt to Adrian Stokes, a group reader response to a poem about witnessing rape, a study of the Cold War context and an essay on the importance of translation to the handling of the topic), ‘Home Abroad’ (three essays dealing with Liverpool and Japan in the poems of travel and home-coming), ‘Arts of Eye and Ear’ (on the ekphrastic poems, on a key optical motif and on the relationship with pop culture).