Robin Robertson has a book of folk tales out in the autumn called Grimoire.
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;...
When the day-birds have settled in their creaking trees, the doors of the forest open for the flitting drift of deer among the bright croziers of new ferns and the legible stars; foxes stream from the earth; a tawny owl frisks the long meadow. In a slink of river-light, the mink’s face is already slippery with yolk, and the bay’s tiny islands are drops...
Four hollows and four seal-skins on the beach, by a cave, their stink undercut by the faint scent of ambrosia; some tracks, of wild boar and panther; the scales of a serpent; the hair, perhaps, of a bearded lion; torn leaves from a tree when there were no trees anywhere near; and, round a puddle of fresh water, scorch-marks in the sand and the signs of a struggle.
Seemed quiet enough...
A flight of loose stairs off the street into a high succession of empty rooms, prolapsed chairs and a memory of women perfumed with hand-oil and artemisia absinthium: wormwood to me, and to the sappy Russian sailors, chernobyl. The scooped-back ballroom gown shows the tell-tale bra-strap: red, tired, losing its elasticity. ‘Leave it,’ my maths master used to say at a...
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...
R obin 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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