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“... The estate at dawn hangs like smoke; the forest drawn in grainy bands of smeared, cross-hatched, illegible trees: a botched photocopy of itself. Swamp maple, sugar maple, red and white oak; first light lifts the pale yellow flare of a beech tree’s papery leaves. Where are you going? What on earth’s the time? A salting of snow, blown across the white table of the lake: thrown leaves scrape and scratch the hard new surface, to be fluked away, in another gust, like cards ...”

“... for Maggie FergussonFour years old, I was, when her thrawn mood finally snapped.‘What you staring at? That daft face on you.You’re always gawking, always querious.Watch the wind doesn’t change, or you’ll stay like that…’So I stayed and watched the wind so long I became it;became it, for its very changing.My sklent eye took in everything –the fear, the wonder of this world:the haughland; the simmer dim; that broken birdlike a furtive Christ, moving, in the half-light, tree to tree;the fox on the beach, the deer at gaze, the bite of fireat the gorse-field; the way men passed the deadthrough a hole they’d made in the wall, then closed it fastagainst the soul returning ...”

“... Between the Harvest and the Hunter’s Moon Returning from war, or the rumours of war, I shelter in the lea of the great stone eagle’s head that marks the edge of Carn Boel, what remains of my uniform tattered and tailed as velvet from antlers, as moss flayed from this stretching rack of rock. From here, the sea is scalloped in marbled endpapers of green and blue and grey; it’s hard to tell if the long black shapes are drifting seals, or reefs, or sailors sleeping in the shallows ...”

“... for Richard ScottAll night preparing: the pelts oiled, blades whetted, the flaneschecked for truth and sharpness, set loose enoughthere in the quiver, before the dawn, before the Becoming.To hunt the stag with honour, Father said, you mustchange your shape and nature: assume his form.Latching on the headpiece, the skullcap with its horns,I walked soft into the morning, alert, changed:no longer man but hart, red deer, fiadh, stag ...”

“... The prominent headland at Tynemouth in Northumberland was the site of an Anglian monastery before the Benedictine priory was established early in the 11th century. Because of the area’s strategic importance, the monastic life coexisted with a military one, and the priory developed within a castle enclosure. These fortifications remained in use after the Dissolution, the coastal battery offering protection to the mouth of the Tyne during the wars against France and Germany ...”

“... after Nonnus I Her only home was here in this forest, among the high rocks, sending her long arrows in flight through the standing pines as if threading nets in the air. She’d never seen a cup of wine or a perfumed room, or a bed: she drank chill water from the mountain brook and had only ever lain with lionesses, newly delivered of their cubs, who licked her hard white body, whimpering there like dogs ...”

“... The Wood of Lost Things We went for walks here, as children, listening out for gypsies, timber wolves, the great hinges in the trees. Hours we’d wander its long green halls making swords from branches, gathering stars of elderflower to thread into a chain. Today the forest sends up birds to distract me, deer to turn me from the track, puts out stems and tendrils to trip and catch at my feet ...”

“... after Ovid for James Lasdun The midday sun finds a way down into a deep cleft in the mountain meshed with cypresses and pine, to flare on a distant speck of glass: the sacred pool where twenty Amnisian nymphs attend their queen, huntress and protectress of this place, these woods and hills. As she steps forward, they take her clothes and stand aside, while the deftest folds the locks of hair into a knot ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... after Nonnus Hardened by the hills of Phrygia, quickened by its streams, the boy-god Dionysus came of age. And as his own body changed his eyes grew wider, and turned towards the bodies of others. Ampelos was the one, above all: most beautiful boy, most beautiful of satyrs: lean and long and new. Even his flaws were gorgeous: the bony nubs at the forehead, that slight skip in his step, sometimes; the way he slept in a curve, his soft tail slacked over his haunches ...”

“... 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, flutes – not even music – shouting and screaming and dancing up the mountain to kill some goat, no doubt ...”

“... Dumb Show, with CandlesStill as a battlefield, the strewn citygoes under, slips into silhouette.Some threads of smoke,the lift and fall of flags in orange light.The glinting windows go out one by one.Low over the Firth, a fork of geesecomes pulling past, straight-necked:creaking like rowlocksover the frozen hill.On the Parthenon below, querulous gullsscreel and skraik and peel away,bickering, into the air’s tow ...”

“... after Ovid Pentheus – man of sorrows, king of Thebes – despised the gods, and had no time for blind old men or their prophecies. ‘You’re a fool, Tiresias, and you belong in the darkness. Now, leave me be!’ ‘You might wish, sire, for my affliction soon enough, if only to save you from witnessing the rites of Dionysus. He is near at hand, I feel it now, and if you fail to honour him – your cousin the god – you will be torn to a thousand ribbons left hanging in the trees, your blood fouling your mother and her sisters ...”

“... 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 sufferers are so entranced by the appearance of what’s happening to them that they can’t actually see how bad it is. There is a fine slight poem from Slow Air (2002) called ‘Break’ in which a woman is washing glasses in the sink and hears a dull click, like a tongue, under the soap suds ...”

“... He has some Durex, you let him fuck you. – He was kind of lonesome, as the words go. Litany For Robin Robertson Dear god,         let me remember these months of transition in a room on the Harrow Road, the traffic muffled by a plastic sheet, the facing ziggurats with their satellite dishes and tea-towels out to dry, a lengthwise Brazilian flag ...”