Peter Robinson

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Biographical note:  Peter Robinson was born in the north of England in 1953. He was educated at York and Cambridge. During the 1970s and 80s he taught for various institutions and was involved with the Cambridge Poetry Festival. He co-edited the magazines Perfect Bound and Numbers. Since 1989, he has been a visiting professor of English Literature in Japan, at present in Sendai, where he lives with his wife and their two daughters.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710447
ISBN-10:  1844710440
ISBN-13:  9781844710447
Author:  Peter Robinson
Title:  Untitled Deeds
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-04
Extent:  124pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  186 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Over the past quarter of a century or so, Peter Robinson has gained a reputation for his lyric poetry, translations, and critical writings devoted to modern and contemporary verse.

Untitled Deeds is composed of sequenced aphorisms, observations, and remarks on such varied topics as the fear of death, mobile phones, conceptual art, international soccer, the linguistic behaviour of politicians, market forces, and, of course, the writing and reception of poetry. It is followed by The Draft Will, a series of prose-poems which explores some obscured questions of family history and the intimate nature of cultural inheritance, and then by Side Effects, a set of poems in prose which – as its title suggests – is concerned with the sorts of unexpected damage produced by various life crises. Readers of Peter Robinson’s work will find his formal sensitivity and imaginative intelligence equally in play here. Those new to his writings will have an unusual introduction to his abiding cultural and literary concerns.

Table of contents:
I Untitled Deeds
II The Draft Will
III Side Effects
Talking to Language
A Woman a Poem a Picture
If I Hold the Words
Time Trouble
Personal Boxes
Side Effects
Fairground Dusk
The Pavilion
Poetic Justice
Summer Cinema
The Windscreen Cleaner
Leaving the Country
On the Past
The Blue Shelters
Domestic Epigrams
Year-Forgetting

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Excerpt from book:  

Side Effects

When death cuffed me across the face, I didn’t turn the other cheek, but flinched, and from one corner of an eye, the wide field’s blur just shaded into night.
   Now mountains come at me askance. Along a road home’s snaking curves, earth’s rim, its margin’s hazed by a dusk sun–flared through cloud–wisps trailed above the tree fringe, frayed, and now in silhouette.
   I keep an eye on it, blood streaming in the firmament, broadcasting tower and Ferris wheel glinting at a distance. Though it’s almost five o’clock, the light of day still lingers. I keep an eye on it, twisting my neck round that bit more to the right.
   It’s like wiping the smile off one side of your face. That slice of death still stares me down from any bathroom mirror. In it, a temple and part–unlined forehead don’t live up to who they are – as if I had no strains or stresses, time couldn’t leave its mark on me, as if a half a life weren’t over.

Review quote:  It’s such features as the smoothly-articulated densities of observation and mental event and the careful placing of the figure representing the empirical Peter Robinson that confirm his singularity … close attention to the visual hints will show a poet intimately involved with the physical world and its evidences.

Roy Fisher

Review quote:  We need this kind of poetry.

Kate Price

Review quote:  Untitled Deeds, a book of aphorisms and prose fragments, is a departure, for him and a typically adventurous publication by Salt … his prose is crisp and he has a good ear for the mix of closure and open-endedness that a good aphorism contains … The last two sections … are prose poem sequences of real intensity and intelligence, by turns memoir, speculation, lyric description and autobiographical fragment. In these pieces, Robinson returns to and amplifies his familiar subjects — family history, personal crisis, questions of culture, place and belonging — with renewed energy and force … A new direction? Certainly an interesting and welcome one.

Patrick McGuinness
Poetry Review

Review quote:  Robinson’s book … is experimental and internationalist in approach, an exploration of possibilities, a tangle of travels and journeys. The incredible variety of its kinships (from Barthes’ ‘Lover’s Discourse’ and Baudrillard’s ‘Fragments’ to Dr. Johnson and Dante) tell their own story about the sequence’s elusive, provocative nature … Readers prepared to deliberate will want to spend more time tracing Robinson's careful and illuminating progress.

Peter Carpenter
The Use of English