Books by Peter Robinson

Book SynopsisIn recognition of the town’s long history and rich heritage, the poems gathered in this anthology celebrate Reading’s connections with poetry, both past and present. Written by poets who live or have lived in the area, many of the poems are set in Reading and the Thames Valley and make reference to poems and writers associated with the town over the years: Coleridge in flight from his university debts, Rimbaud’s association with a language school in King’s Road, Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’, Jane Austen’s only formal schooling, and Dickens’s many visits to the town. The anthology is also an essential introduction to reading poetry. Each poet has provided his or her own account of their relation to the anthology’s theme, their inspiration, their muse. The poets represented are Paul Bavister, Adrian Blamires, David Cooke, Jane Draycott, Claire Dyer, John Froy, A.F. Harrold, Ian House, Wendy Klein, Gill Learner, Allison McVety, Kate Noakes, Victoria Pugh, Peter Robinson, Lesley Saunders, Susan Utting, and Jean Watkins. Specially commissioned illustrations from Sally Castle round off this refreshingly approachable collection.Trade Review‘one of the most thoroughly enjoyable books of poetry I have read of late … I was moved by their calm, lyrical approach … This collection reminds us of what is great about English poetry … its continuity, its depth of field, and its constant surprising relationship to wherever it happens to find itself … a glimpse into what living in a less-than-metropolitan city over here is like, and how poets get on with words day to day … get this exemplary beautifully-made collection’ — Todd Swift, Eyewear

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Book SynopsisThe stories brought together in Foreigners, Drunks and Babies cast the slanting light of a poet's sensibility on the Imperial Academy of an ancient Eastern empire; detail the musical education of a northern realist parish priest and his sons; travel through the West of Ireland with a couple facing various extinctions; spy on the shadowy private life of a Cold War warrior; engage in hand-to-hand fighting with a classroom full of Soviet teachers; follow the adventures of an Italian girl visiting her sick boyfriend in hospital; discover how hard it can be to get a passport for your first-born; find out why everyone pretends you're not there; investigate a seemingly victimless crime; reveal reasons for a Japanese girl's committing suicide; and realize that there's no need to be forgiven for things you didn't know you hadn't done. In this first collection of his imaginative fiction, Peter Robinson, winner of the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations for his poems and translations, brings a characteristic perceptiveness, rhythmical accuracy, and vividness of evocation to these eleven examples of what he's been doing in the gaps between his other writings. His new and returning readers may be both surprised and entertained.

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Book Synopsis'Like the Living End', an elegy occasioned by the sudden death of a school friend, is the centre-piece of this gathering of poems completed since The Returning Sky (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Described as 'the finest poet of his generation' and 'the finest poet alive when it comes to the probing of shifts in atmosphere, momeTrade Review'These poems are vivid, formally experimental, often strangely celebratory - written with great warmth and tenderness', observe the selectors in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin, adding that 'Robinson is able to bring off rapid and surprising shifts in register within poems shot through with wit', and concluding that here is 'a concentration and confidence that mark this out as his finest work to date.' 'a poet who is writing at the height of his powers' - The London Magazine 'he is a major English poet' - Poetry ReviewTable of ContentsDirty World 1 For the Years 2 In the Drift 3 Rubbish Theory 4 Coincidences 6 Between Parentheses 7 All Change 8 Next to Nothing 9 Another Twilight 10 One Late Afternoon 11 A Middle-Age Scene 12 Note to Self 13 Ein Feste Burg 14 Like the Living End 16 On the Esplanade 23 Diminishing Returns 24 Holy Dying 26 Notes 27

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Book SynopsisThe poet’s eleventh collection, marks a wholly unexpected development, prompted, as is evident throughout, by the fissures exported from a political party to an entire country, and beyond, by the 2016 referendum on membership of the EuropeanUnion. Its consequences cast crucial events for this poet, bothpersonal and public, into unforeseen fresh lights. Prompted by a televised debate to wonder in the title poem upon what impulse the founding European myth is based, Robinson’s new poems search through his individual and cultural memory to offer, as the book unfolds, an answer.Table of ContentsOne 1 Belongings 3 Monterosso 5 Written in the Bay 6 Violated Landscape 7 Ravishing Europa 8 Lincolnshire Landscapes 9 Balkan Trilogy 11 Garden Thoughts 13 Bibliographical Note 14 In the Apennines 15 Women of Elche 17 Plaza de las Monjas 19 On a Walk to Sonning 22 Out of Europe 24 The Prospects 25 Sonning Lock 27 World Citizens 28 Die Holzwege 30 Night Flight 32 Post-Truth 34 Two 35 Bloomsbury Way 37 The Hard and Soft of It 39 Drawing a Line 40 The Vehicle 42 Where Europe Ends 45 The Further Losses 50 Saudades da Europa 54 At this Distance 56 Last Refuge 57 Cold Comfort 58 The Irish Border 59 Wall-to-Wall 62 Don Quixote in Sofia 63 On the Electricity 64 Three 65 This Last Year 67 Leave to Remain 69 European Epitaphs 72 Colouring the Past 82 Haus Europe 84 Postcards from Bern 86 Empty Vase 88 Notes 89 Acknowledgements 94

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Book SynopsisTaking some convalescent wanders around Reading, the narrator of The Constitutionals, a figure haunted by being called Crusoe in childhood, also `sets out to avert global catastrophe, hoping to trigger the end of neoliberalism by going for a walk.' What does he discover about the place in which he's settled with his wife, who he will call Friday, and their ocean-haunted daughter? Published on the tercentenary of Robinson Crusoe's appearance, our author answers such questions by paying sustained tribute to the town, and the founding `autobiography' by which it has-as have so many works alluded to here-been indelibly marked.Trade Review`Drinking deep from one of the great and self-renewing sources of the English imagination, Peter Robinson caulks the punctured craft of contemporary fiction. His wit and intelligence reinvigorate our diminished sense of the local: as it reluctantly reveals itself through a series of melancholy peregrinations. Here the solitary poet walks with his invisible peers, ventriloquizing the grateful dead, and making new’—IAIN SINCLAIR

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Book SynopsisBonjour Mr Inshaw is a homage by the award-winning poet Peter Robinson to David Inshaw, the celebrated painter, whom he first met during the artist's years as Creative Arts Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the mid-1970s. Largely produced in an unexpected burst of inspiration after a visit to the painter's studio early in 2019, these poems combine memories of Inshaw's paintings, or characteristic landscapes, with experiences of his company and conversation. Showing a formal flexibility and deftness characteristic of this poet's work, they reflect on the role of art in a time of political and cultural division. Presented in an en face format, Bonjour Mr Inshaw beautifully illustrates its ekphrastic encounters and allows us to reflect in turn on this contemporary example of the centuries-old dialogue between the arts of poetry and painting. `Following the visionary traditions of such quintessentially English predecessors as Samuel Palmer ... or Stanley Spencer ... Inshaw's paintings discover the mystical in what could just as easily be overlooked as the mundane.' - Rachel Campbell-Johnston, art critic for The Times `Robinson is the finest poet alive when it comes to the probing of shifts in atmosphere, momentary changes in the weather of the mind, each poem an astonishingly fine-tuned gauge for recording the pressures and processes that generate lived occasions' - Adam Piette in The ReaderTrade Review"The stillness of Inshaw’s focus upon more than the moment is complimented by the way in which Peter Robinson’s poems note the depth of the present’s conversation with the past" ~ Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence

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Book SynopsisThe first edition of English Nettles brought together poems Peter Robinson began writing on his return to England after many years living in Japan. The twenty-three works, evocatively illustrated by Sally Castle, show the poet's ability to catch at fleeting landscapes and moments as, discovering Reading, he reacquainted himself with his native land. The poems celebrate his collaboration with the artist in their tribute to the place in which he came to settle. This beautifully redesigned new edition brings the book back into print, and includes an additional poem and illustration. Running through their lines like the town's two arteries are oblique reflections on the meaning of home, the nature of money, work, love, death, and parenthood. Approachable yet inexhaustible, Peter Robinson's poetry welcomes readers and promises rewards that can be kept.Trade Review"... the finest poet of his generation" - PN Review; "Robinson is at his best when describing the strangeness of marginalia such as ... "a creosoted shed / with ivy busting through its boards" ... where time is distorted and realigned like perspectives in a mirror so that a return "home" feels as strange as being in a foreign country" - Poetry London; "... a major English poet" - Poetry Review;

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Book SynopsisThe Retrieved Attachments in Peter Robinson’s new collection are to people and places, friends and loved ones, mentor poets and artists. Deploying the full range of his gifts, these poems are characteristically responsive both to fresh encounters and evocative returns. Presented in five titled sections they revisit the landscapes of his years in Japan, find a way to tell the story of a heartbreak, return to familial locations in an unvisitable Italy, elegize or re-encounter companions and friends, and, for the final section, recover intimate senses of a locality’s flora and fauna. Peter Robinson has been described as ‘the finest poet of his generation’ (PN Review) and ‘a major English poet’ (Poetry Review). Retrieved Attachments again shows why.Trade Review"Robinson’s attentiveness to the nuances of place, even those that appear unpromising on conventional aesthetic terms, has been apparent since his very earliest work and poems here like ‘Across the Park’, ‘Toast Funèbre’ and ‘Behind the Shops’ are further examples of this – acute observations of the modern human landscape that excavate meaning from what’s typically overlooked or ignored and connects it into the broader state we’re in." - Tom Phillips, in The High Window

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