Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson has published a number of pamphlets of poems, the most recent being Anaglypta. His translations of Vittorio Sereni’s poetry will be published this year.

Received Accents

Peter Robinson, 20 February 1986

Charles Tomlinson has a poem called ‘Class’ about the Midland pronunciation of the first letter of the alphabet. In the last chapter of Some Americans, the poet tells how for a short time he was Percy Lubbock’s secretary at a villa near Lerici. In ‘Class’, he says he tried to pronounce the ‘ah’ of received English, but couldn’t and, because ‘I too visibly shredded his fineness,’ was released from the post. The version of this incident in Some Americans indicates that his encounter with ‘the author of The Craft of Fiction’ left a wound. The poem is more openly dismissive of his one-time employer:

Love in the Ruins

Nicolas Tredell, 8 October 1992

In Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, the Prince found by the River Thames ‘a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber’. Of...

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Jokes

Donald Davie, 11 June 1992

It seems now that there was always something odd about Peter Robinson’s being the editor, in 1985, of Geoffrey Hill: Essays on His Work, from the Open University Press. Robinson’s...

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Travellers

John Kerrigan, 13 October 1988

August is the cruellest month, breeding tailbacks on the Dover Road and logjams in every departure lounge. Travel reverts to travail, stirring dull roots in trepalium – that classical...

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The Case for Geoffrey Hill

Tom Paulin, 4 April 1985

Geoffrey Hill’s second collection of poems, King Log, was published in 1968, that year of student radicalism and disappointment. Hill’s title is reactionary in its implications and...

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