Robin Robertson has a book of folk tales out in the autumn called Grimoire.
You sleep as I stumble room to room, unhelmed, heavy-greaved; coming to you through gorse-light and the fallen trees: heraldic, blessed with wounds. Red-handed at the key I was stock-still, gazing back at deer-slots in the snow: flushed, quick from the kill, carrying my shot, my sadness like a stone. In the quarry-hole of your bed you’re sleeping still.
After the OverdoseWhat...
In the greatness of the flame he gave up the ghost
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, XI
The poplars are emptied at dusk like blown matches. A gust frees and scatters the leaves in their last blaze: the bronze husks catch and cartwheel round and down the street to the park in the smoke of a dark autumn, from the thin, extinguished trees.
In the small lake, what had once been water now was...
nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat (Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 388)
I
A bright clearing. Sun among the leaves, sifting down to dapple the soft ground, and rest a gilded bar against the muted flanks of trees. In the flittering green light the glade listens in and breathes.
A wooden pail; some pegs, a coil of wire; a bundle of steel flensing knives.
Spreadeagled between two pines, hooked at each hoof...
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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