Wrecking Light
Robin Robertson's fourth collection is an intense, moving, bleakly lyrical, and at times shocking book. These poems are written with the authority of classical myth, yet sound utterly contemporary. The poet's gaze--whether on the natural world or the details of his own life--is unflinching and clear, its utter seriousness leavened by a wry, dry, and disarming humor.
Alongside fine translations from Neruda and Montale and dynamic retellings of stories from Ovid, the poems here pitch the power and wonder of nature against the frailty and failure of the human. This is a book of considerable grandeur and sweep that confirms Robertson as one of the most arresting and powerful poets at work today.
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Robin Robertson is from the northeast coast of Scotland. He has published five collections of poetry--most recently Hill of Doors--and has received numerous accolades, including the Petrarca Prize, the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and all three Forward Prizes. In 2006 he published The Deleted World, a selection of English versions of poems by Tomas Transtromer, and has since translated two plays by Euripides, Medea and The Bacchae.
"Robertson's fourth collection is astonishing in its eclecticism..." Publishers Weekly "There's a drama and majesty here that also teaches us a lesson: That a writer, a poet especially, has the power to make an act of recovery. In "Leaving St. Kilda" Robertson recalls all those unique, old names (and who, by the way, first named them?) before they're lost -- before the clouds stream over them, as they do over Mullach Mòr, and they're forgotten. Elsewhere in this somber, beautiful collection, Robertson does the same with smaller, fleeting moments of insight as his speakers confront the passing of time -- how, for instance, in "Landfall," the "crates that once held herring, / freshly dead, now hold distance, nothing but the names/ of the places I came from, years ago." Los Angeles Times --
