Robin Robertson has a book of folk tales out in the autumn called Grimoire.
In this bled landscape wind moves through the desert bones, fluting their white notes.
*
Wildfires sweep the hills, jump the highways. Outside town fence-posts are burning.
*
The guns go one way, drugs go the other, over the desert border.
*
There’s crystal meth, coke, PCP, smack; after that Tipp-Ex, gasoline.
*
In Juárez tonight three decapitados hang from the Bridge of Dreams.
*
...
after Ovid
At the world’s centre between earth and sky and sea is a place where every sound can be heard, where everything is seen. Here Rumour lives, making her home on a mountain-top. This house stands open night and day: a dome of apertures and windows set like a million eyes at gaze, steady, unblinking, no doors or shutters anywhere. Her walls have ears. They are...
I
A manor house in ruin. It suits me down to the ground. A tower to write in, three rooms for the family, with a kitchen, and all for fifty crowns a month. Unbelievably filthy, I have to say: everything broken, unfinished, abandoned. In the yard, two floors below, a mongrel half-heartedly mounts a greyhound; blue flies are hatching in the dung. It fits my mood. Wherever you look: neglect,...
They lashed him to old timbers that would barely float, with weights at the feet so only his face was out of the water. Over his mouth and eyes they tied two live mackerel with twine, and pushed him out from the rocks.
They stood, then, smoking cigarettes and watching the sky, waiting for a gannet to read that flex of silver from a hundred feet up, close its wings and...
Son of Zeus, son of the thunderbolt, Iacchus the twice-born, child of the double door, Bromius the roaring god, the coming one, the vanishing one, the god who stands apart; god of frenzy and release, god of the vine. The one of many names and many faces. The horned god. Young beyond time. The god that changes. The Other. Dionysus.
*
‘And noise, just a lot of noise: drums, cymbals,...
Robin Robertson reads several poems, including his Nonnus poems – ‘The Coming God’, ‘Dionysus in Love’, ‘Dionysus and the Maiden’ and ‘The God Who Disappears’.
Robin Robertson is something of a specialist in pain. He usually describes what painful events look like from the outside rather than how they feel from within. It’s often as though...
Kenneth Koch ends his fine and amusing collection, One Train, with a sequence called ‘On Aesthetics’, which, amongst many other things, takes in the aesthetics of Paul Valéry,...
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