Robin Robertson has a book of folk tales out in the autumn called Grimoire.
nec enim praesentior illo est deus Asterion, his name is, King of Stars. Some joke of his father’s, who now stables him here in these spiralled halls, this walled-up palace, where shame cries itself to sleep.
Where is my mother? Whyhas she left me here alone?This is a house of many cornersbut only one room, made of stone.I live inside this stone.
See how he prowls and paces, my beast of...
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...
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...
meet me where the sun goes down meet me in the cave, under the battleground meet me on the broken branch meet me in the shade, below the avalanche meet me under the witch’s spell meet me tonight, in the wishing well meet me on the famine lawn meet me in the eye of the firestorm meet me in your best shoes and your favourite dress meet me on your own, in the wilderness meet me as my...
The room sizzles in the morning sun. A tinnitus of flies throbs at the bright windows, butting and dunting the glass; one dings off the light, to the floor, vibrating blackly – pittering against the wall before taxi and take-off: another low moaning flight, another fruitless stab at the world outside. They drop on my desk, my hands, and spin their long deaths on...
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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