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Cluster index: Peter Robinson

The campus novel.

Fortnightly Fiction. By PETER ROBINSON. Some time ago it was the fashion, and perhaps it is so still, to append to the title of a novel the words: a true story. Well, that is a little innocent deception … —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. UPPOSE YOU’LL be putting us all in your next one,’ I found myself […]

Four Poems on Affairs of State.

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…’

A Life in Poetry: Peter Robinson.

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.’

Oblique Lights.

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

‘The Ringstead Poems’.

Tom Phillips: ‘Robinson, his wife Ornella, and their friends the engaged artist Jenny Polak and economist Martha Prevezer – to whom poems in the sequence are dedicated – stayed with other family members at the Mill for several days during the summer of 2015 and initially perhaps ‘The Ringstead Poems’ might appear made up of a series of discrete moments and specific experiences from that stay, much in the manner of a poetic diary.’

Blind summits.

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.’

Everything that is the case.

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.’

Two uncollected personal poems.

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….’

Dreamt Affections.

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?’

Manifestos for a lost cause.

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

Ravishing Europa.

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 …’

Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’.

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.’

Seven poems: Peter Robinson.

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…’

Grisaille.

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

Bench Marks.

Peter Robinson: ‘If you give me a piece of your mind
— one looking or formed like
a school desk fissured with inscriptions’…