Робин Робертсон – лучшие книги

Walker, a young Canadian recently demobilised after war and his active service in the Normandy landings and subsequent European operations. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and unable to face a return to his family home in rural Nova Scotia, he goes in search of freedom, change, anonymity and repair. We follow Walker through a sequence of poems as he moves through post-war American cities of New York, Los Angles and San Francisco.

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.

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 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.