*****

Peter Robinson has published various volumes of aphorisms, fiction and literary criticism. For some of his collections of poetry and translations he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations. His most recent publications are Retrieved Attachments (Two Rivers Press), reviewed here, The Collected Poems of Giorgio Bassani translated with Roberta Antognini (Agincourt Press), and a bilingual selection of his poems translated by Pietro De Marchi with Ornella Trevisan and the author entitled L’apprendista libraio e altri versi parmigiani (Silva Editore).

*****

Review • Poems

*****

Retrieved Attachments by Peter Robinson. £11.99. Two Rivers Press.
ISBN 978-1-915048-05-9. Reviewed by Tom Phillips

Since his Collected Poems 1976-2016 appeared from Shearsman in 2017, Peter Robinson has published the volume of Brexit-response poems, Ravishing Europa (Worple, 2019), a collection responding to and including the work of artist David Inshaw, Bonjour Mr Inshaw (Two Rivers Press, 2020) and a revised edition of English Nettles (Two Rivers Press, 2022), poems written after his return from 18 years living in Japan and illustrated by Sally Castle. Now comes Retrieved Attachments, a sort of overlapping volume, gathering together not only many new poems, but also a number of ‘recovered and revised’ older pieces not included in Collected Poems and a number written around the same time as those in Ravishing Europa but not pertinent to its theme.

As its title indicates, it’s a collection much concerned with the act of retrieval in all senses, whether that be through return visits to known land- and cityscapes, through reconnecting with friends and, after the Covid-19 lockdowns, with people in general, or indeed through writing itself. Poetry, it suggests, can be a means of both forming attachments in the first place (as Robinson himself has noted) and of re-forming them when, for whatever reason, these attachments are damaged or interrupted.

This is immediately evident from the poems in the first section, ‘Return to Sendai’, effectively a punningly titled sequence of poems that originate in Robinson’s ‘journey – / a sentimental one / back home, or so it seems / after these ten years’ to Japan. Revisiting places he lived and wrote about during his time there, they inevitably reflect changes in both the places themselves (the university compound in Sendai where he and his wife lived has been demolished, a tsunami has changed the coastal landscape nearby, sweeping whole communities away) and in himself, with something as familiar as ‘Blossom time back in Kyoto’ enabling him ‘to catch at glimpses of ourselves / from the lives that were’. These are not merely nostalgic exercises, however, and what ‘all comes flooding back’ can ‘chasten and chastise’ as much as it might alleviate a sense of displacement in being once again in an environment that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.

Elsewhere the poems document visits to Switzerland, returns to Italy (a country with which the poet has long-running attachments), psychogeographical wanderings through his current home city of Reading and re-encounters with Liverpool where he spent much of his childhood and adolescence.

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, as in these few lines from ‘The Apprentice Bookseller’:

and I won’t lie, this no-place is
a home from home for the likes of us,
its towers, rose towers policing traces
of the profit and the loss.

The ravages of late capitalism – perhaps more openly expressed in Ravishing Europa – remain a key thematic undercurrent, especially but not exclusively in relation to environmental damage, while the sense that we live ‘in a time gone rotten before it’s ripe’ (‘The Last Lamps’) emerges as one of the forces driving the poems as they seek to identify and celebrate the attachments that can be retrieved in a world where our pasts are ‘misread’ and ‘false futures come / to exile us from our own lives’.

The somewhat baleful title of the final section – ‘Manifestos for a Lost Cause’ – suggests Auden’s infamous assertion that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, and yet, in many ways, the poetry in Retrieved Attachments suggests something else – that while it might not be capable of bringing about seismic changes, poetry is more than capable of offering us ways of looking at the world which, in their turn, offer both grounds for some hope and reparative solace in our ‘cabined, cribbed confinement’ and ‘inner emigration’ – despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Tom Phillips was born and spent most of his adult life in the UK, but now lives and works as a writer, translator and teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria. His poetry has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies, as well as the full-length collections Unknown Translations (Scalino, 2016), Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2012) and Burning Omaha (Firewater 2003). Since moving to Sofia, he has published four online pamphlets: Scenes from Unfilmed Cinema (2021), And Now Rousing Music (2020), Foreign in Europe (2019), Present Continuous (2018) – which can be downloaded from his blog.

Back to the top

*****

Peter Robinson: Four Poems

ABOVE THE SEA

In a bar above the sea at Sori,
overwhelmed by all its bay
held in the light of sensations that day,
I was gazing at sailboats, swimmers and the rocks …
You told me it’s where you wrote your diary
and I thought: ‘not enough
just to live’, what you need’s a narrative,
but then again, how give
sensations a plot sounding true to one another,
and how plait all the threads together
or leave them dangling …
Yet while the waves broke over those rocks
as momentary patterns and vortices,
I could sense in unpredictable, reiterating shocks
a way to weave the story of your love.

from Retrieved Attachments

THIS OTHER LIFETIME

for Ornella

Green shutters open on an early sky:
in the Casa Divina Provvidenza
even its room doors, closing, breathe a sigh.

With time, heat would release your love,
till evening’s fresher breeze,
then starlight, the companionate,

and talking on a phone, you see
her hurry towards our rendezvous
beside Mazzini’s statue in the square:

an open face, still trusting as you like,
enlivened with enthusiasm,
unfazed by time and, no mistake,

that’s the zone from where all this life came.

from Retrieved Attachments

LANDSCAPE WITH PIGSTIES

‘Don’t you love these landscapes with big skies?’
I was saying towards the Wirral shore
with torrential rain come blowing through
giving way to piled summer clouds and more
strong sun-shafts breaking across you …
But mum, you heard me say ‘pigsties’
and immediately to my mind’s eye
there rise those landscapes with each shed
spaced across fields on an open hillside.
There’ll be farmhands distributing feed and
though we can’t do a thing about the sky
or bacon futures, I can understand
your fiddling with that hearing aid
and puzzled look at what you think I’ve said.

Uncollected

SPINOZA’S HOUSE AT RIJNSBURG
after Giovanni Giudici

Why visit to profane, whether tourist or not,
the great lens grinder’s lodgings
or beg forgiveness from his spirit
should there be the slightest hint of it?

And why gaze more than might be appropriate
at the inkwell’s pewter
or spoons hung now like a weapon on the wall
from all that soup-stirring through winter?

Why decipher his few books’ spines
where passion and science combine
or fix some titles in your mind’s eye – trying
the delicate ghost who would consult them?

And why poke into his grinding machine,
that worn-out plaything
on the left of a small desk set before
the window, where his patience,

in this surgeon’s home you’d not suppose
quite so near the sea,
three years faithfully he would house
towards the true coming of his heart’s magnanimity?

Uncollected

 

Back to the top