Books by Peter Robinson

Book SynopsisWhen Bernard Spencer died in September 1963, he left behind two collections of poetry and a volume of collaborative translations from George Seferis. The second of these collections, With Luck Lasting, has proved aptly entitled with the publications of a Collected Poems (1965) edited by Alan Ross, an enlarged edition from 1981 edited by Roger Bowen, and a Complete Poetry, Translations & Selected Prose (2011) edited by Peter Robinson. With Bernard Spencer: Essays on his Poetry & Life, Robinson now offers the first collection of writings dedicated to the poet. Coming out of a 2009 centenary conference at Special Collections in the University of Reading, where his archive is housed, these essays cover a great many aspects of Spencer's poetry, translations, and his relations with contemporary writers. The volume also contains an updated bibliography of primary and secondary materials, and forms an invaluable aid to approaching this distinctive voice in mid-twentieth-century poetry.

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Book SynopsisHearing Rilke quoted at the Co-op, an experience evoked in the title poem to Peter Robinson's latest collection, Buried Music, the poet continues his work of discovering poetry in everyday, anywhere places. It is as if, as Roy Fisher intuited, 'he carries a listening device, alert for the moments when the tectonic plates of mental experience slide quietly one beneath another to create paradoxes and complexities that call for poems to be made.' Prompted by varieties of losses - health, hopes, friends or relatives - his listening unearths a rhythmic contour from such opening cracks in the terrain. Buried Music finds poetry in its absence, presence in the place of what's missing. For those who have followed his trajectory, this new book offers a fresh opportunity to tune in to the work of what Poetry Review has called 'a major English poet', one according to The London Magazine, who is 'writing at the height of his powers' and producing, in the words of the selectors for the Poetry Book Society in 2012, 'his finest work to date.' For those new to his writing, this world is all before you.

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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 SynopsisPoetry & Money: A Speculation is a study of relationships between poets, poetry, and money from Chaucer to contemporary times. It begins by showing how trust is essential to the creation of value in human exchange, and how money can, depending on conditions, both enable and disable such trustfully collaborative generations of value. Drawing upon a vast range of poetry for its exemplifications, the book includes studies of poetic hardship, religious verse and debt redeeming, the South Sea Bubble and the economic revolution, debates over metallic and paper currency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as modernist struggles with the gold standard, depression, inflation, and the realised groundlessness of exchange value. With its practitioner’s attention to the minutiae of poetic technique, it considers analogies between words and coins, and between poetic rhythm and the circulation of currencies in an economy. Through its close readings of poems over many centuries directly or indirectly engaged with money, it proposes ways in which, while we cannot escape monetary economies, we can resist, to some extent, being ensnared and diminished by them – through a fresh understanding of values money may serve to enable, but ones which are nevertheless beyond price.Trade Review'To call this original book "rich" and "rewarding" (and I do) is only to demonstrate the extent to which money and its metaphors permeate areas of cultural value and valuation. Examining those metaphors is essentially the method of this study, though Robinson never forgets that artworks assert their value in unique, if compromised, ways. Robinson transacts an enviable sweep across the poetries of several centuries and cultures, using his deep and wide knowledge of poetry. Expect some fine archival research, as well as novel and exciting close readings of some canonical and less canonical figures.' Robert Sheppard, Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Poetics, Edge Hill UniversityTable of Contents1. Introductory issues2. Money is a kind of poetry3. Straitened circumstances4. Indebtedness and redemption5. Poetic forms containing rampant money6. For a vast speculation had failed7. Going off the gold standard8. Contracts and prophets9. Circulatory checks and balances10. Getting value out of money

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Book SynopsisIn Poetry & Translation the acclaimed poet and translator Peter Robinson examines the activity of translation practised by poets and others, and the way in which the various practices of translating have continued in parallel with the writing of original poetry. While some attention is paid to classic statements of the translator’s cultural role, readers should not expect to find formalized theoretical debate along the lines already developed in translation studies courses and their teaching handbooks. Instead, Poetry & Translation seeks to raise issues and matters for discussion - not to close them down. The aim of the book is to increase knowledge of, and thought about, the interactive processes of reading and writing poetry composed in mother tongues and in translations. Poetry & Translation will be of value to all devoted readers and students of poetry or translation, to students involved in classical and modern languages, and to those taking part in creative writing courses, whether as students or as teachers.Trade Review'Informative as well as argued, polemical as well as seeking out common ground, and written in a no-nonsense, clear style, Poetry & Translation shows quite simple things to be complex and more nuanced than thought, but has also a refreshing directness about dealing with things that have often been made to seem too complex to deal with. It is also written from the triple perspective of poet, translator and critic. A fine book.' Professor Patrick McGuinness, University of Oxford'Scholars and practitioners of poetry translation will welcome this intelligent and insightful new book.'Gregary J. Racz, Metamorphoses, Vol. 20, No. 1'Robinson’s monograph is a splendid achievement, and should occupy a very desirable place on the shelves of Translation Studies sections in libraries everywhere – even though its argument lays waste to so many of its neighbours.'Adam Piette, Translation and Literature, Vol. 21, No. 2'In this erudite and well-written work, Peter Robinson builds a very strong and highly commendable case for the feasibility of what he terms ‘‘the art of the impossible’’, namely translating poetry.'Peter Flynn, Translation Studies'Vigorously and wittily argued, Robinson’s book is an excellent and provocative contribution to a complex debate.'Justin Quinn, Times Literary SupplementTable of Contents Preface 1. On First Looking 2. What Is Lost? 3. Thou Art Translated 4. The Art of the Impossible 5. Nostalgia for World Culture 6. Translating the ‘Foreign’ 7. The Quick and the Dead Bibliography Index

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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Book Synopsis

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