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A Life in Poetry: Peter Robinson.

Tuesday, 21 March 2023

Peter Robinson:’I’m a northerner, but not a ‘proud’ or ‘professional’ one. Liverpool, where my mother still lives, as do two of my dearest friends, is the only place I can call my hometown.’

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Seven poems: Peter Robinson.

Friday, 15 June 2018

Peter Robinson: ‘Deposited at Castletroy and come
like an old man to this country,
I may stroll at ease
above the Shannon’s dark mutinous waves
into County Clare, then back again…’

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Peter Robinson: Six new poems.

Monday, 3 June 2013

Peter Riley: ‘Peter engages us with moments and passages of his life, quite ordinary ones for the most part, calmly retailed in a language which can carry extensive implications. He does other things too, but I think these six poems particularly demonstrate his qualities as a poet of domesticity, and how much more than that he becomes as the poems pursue their courses.’

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Peter Hughes and Oystercatcher Press.

Thursday, 31 May 2012

Peter Riley: What is demonstrated by Oystercatcher is the great range possible within a broad concept of the continuity of modernism, which means in effect that whatever the ambience of the poetry there is a strongly verbal textuality. Whatever it is concerned with, however it approaches the world, it takes no words for granted, but turns them on their sides and holds them against the light until the balance of intent and accident is clear.

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Four Poems on Affairs of State.

Tuesday, 20 June 2023

Peter Robinson: ‘That Haunted House across the park
with name in red graffiti letters
on tromp-l’oeil weatherboarding is
so very much the worse for wear…’

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Oblique Lights.

Monday, 24 October 2022

Peter Robinson: ‘We’re among them stalking pictures –
as if life were this row of glimpses.
A green dress has some neckline skin.’

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Blind summits.

Thursday, 3 February 2022

Peter Robinson: ‘It’s where this morning in stiff breeze
gig boats were rowed against the swell,
but now there’s almost no horizon
and as little point of vantage.’

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Everything that is the case.

Thursday, 13 January 2022

Peter Robinson: ‘For something to ‘be the case’ in philosophy is of course not the same as ‘the case’ that Oscar Wilde puns on, namely the large valise such as was supposed to contain the two volumes of Miss Prism’s unusually sentimental novel in The Importance of Being Earnest, or, for that matter, the case of a woman suffering from advanced Parkinson’s Disease being taken away from her husband during the opening phases of a global pandemic.’

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Two uncollected personal poems.

Friday, 29 January 2021

Peter Robinson: ‘I didn’t know them, and don’t believe they have been published until now. They do not appear in Derek Slade’s composition chronology for 1990. Both of them are written out in Mary Ellison’s hand. The introductory reflection inscribed above ‘The First Footnote’ reads: ‘Based on a happy marriage to Joyce Holliday Roy is very good at relaxed yet probing friendship….’

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Dreamt Affections.

Thursday, 24 December 2020

Peter Robinson: ‘Has she been modelled from the life –
but composite? Somebody lost?
Someone I had to say goodbye to?
Or is she from that other England?’

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Manifestos for a lost cause.

Tuesday, 10 November 2020

Peter Robinson: ‘Street views, daily routes, routines
past health & safety lamp-standards,
and all the social distancing,
they see us frayed, become untied.’

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Ravishing Europa.

Friday, 1 March 2019

Peter Robinson (from ‘Ravishing Europa’): ‘Still now you haver round our bedroom;/me, I’m undecided whether/it had been an act of loveor violence provided/the very idea, to try the patience/of Europa, send her home …’

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Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’.

Thursday, 28 February 2019

Peter Robinson: ‘The crisis our country is still in as we speak, the withdrawal agreement from the EU not likely to be got ‘over the line’, never mind the treaties that are to establish our future relationship with continental Europe, brought back, as we’ve already touched on, a lifetime of personal and public vicissitudes, and the poems in “Ravishing Europa” came relatively quickly under the pressure of public events as felt on my barometric pulses.’

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Poetry of the second person.

Friday, 29 November 2013

Peter Riley: ‘I think Peter Robinson and John Welsh have quite a lot in common, but handle it differently. With Welch again the reader more-or-less inhabits the poet, and within that persona is led through a lot of streets, rooms, hospitals and cemeteries, always with a problem in mind, a melancholy or a lingering dissatisfaction, a need for resolution, suffering from an “enormous pointlessness”. But we are led further, into different places: an art gallery, the inside of a book, a performance of Hamlet aboard a ship off Sierra Leone in 1607, an Asian estate in East London… and sometimes nowhere in particular. So we do not always know where we are, and do not always need to because some poems are securely based in a conceptual focus, and sometimes we do know, except that bits of the poem escape from time to time into some unknown language laboratory, but this happens less and less these days.’

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Grisaille.

Monday, 3 June 2013

Peter Robinson: ‘‘We must not expend all our limited resources
trying to make water flow uphill.’

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