*****
*****
*****
Doing Things with Words
Peter Robinson talks to W. J. Davies
on the publication
of Return to Sendai: New & Selected Poems 1973-2024 (Cheshire, MA: MadHat Press)
In PN Review 89 (Jan-Feb 1993), John Ashbery wrote:
“We know about ‘strong’ poets; attention must now be paid to the ‘curiously strong’, like James Tate and Charles Simic in America, and England’s Anthony Howell. Peter Robinson (like [Mark] Ford currently residing in Kyoto), especially in his recent collection Leaf Viewing.”
Alongside playfully jabbing at Harold Bloom’s ‘strong’ poets, Ashbery elaborates that he means these are poets and collections which provided him with ‘waves and waves of refreshment…like those “curiously strong” mints you have (or used to have) in England.’ Noticeably, though, Peter Robinson is left somewhat unmoored. He is no longer ‘England’s’ and, since he had only been in Kyoto for two years by this point, could hardly qualify as ‘Japan’s’. This critical dislocation is of course an inevitable part of what it means to be an emigrant poet. These poets are often saddled with the belief that they are no longer capable of writing about their native country with intimacy or their new home with real understanding.
In describing Robinson’s poetry as ‘curiously strong’, however, Ashbery is drawing attention to a different feeling that comes from Robinson’s poems: a quiet conviction in the use of his material regardless of its geographic anchor, be it European involvements, personal or cultural discoveries in Japan, Britain’s changing fortunes, or his private stock of poetic learning and experiences with sound and language. His confidence is not muscular and overbearing; it is reassuring, witty. The result is a poetry capable of making ethical, aesthetic and political observations through asking questions without reaching for or becoming dogma, grounded in the comings and goings of everyday life. ‘Leaving Sapporo,’ included in Robinson’s new collection, Return to Sendai, is prompted by a delay getting to an airport for which the speaker’s friend profusely apologises, and ends with a reflection on the nature of blame:
blame the unforeseen through which we live,
this intimate running up against a sullen sky
and chance encounter with a city fringe’s detail
—but, yourself, forgive.
From a moment familiar to anyone who has travelled abroad, the poem becomes an act of, and meditation on, forgiveness; a way of turning a private event into public truth.
Return to Sendai: New & Selected Poems 1973-2024 is Robinson’s first selected collection published in North America. It gathers poems from a busy and varied career since Ashbery’s remarks in 1993: eighteen years lecturing in Japan, a return to England to take up a post at Reading University, many extended stays in Italy and around Europe, and numerous poetry volumes, translations, editorial projects, critical studies, fiction and more. If Robinson is now not exactly moored, this collection makes the case that he is as much ‘England’s’ as he could be ‘Japan’s’; and on the strength of the poems about the USA, there is good reason to pay renewed attention to his American connections as well. It is a volume that spans Robinson’s first published verse (including an uncollected elegy for Ezra Pound) to new poetry. In this interview conducted in the summer of 2025, we discuss how Peter put the volume together, the American affinities he sees in his poetry and what poetry can do in an ever more divided world.
WJD: Return to Sendai is your first collection of poetry published in the USA, with selections from across your career as well as previously uncollected poems. How did you arrive at the poems you chose and the shape of the volume?
PR: The collection was conceived as a vehicle for presenting what I’ve done over the years, and I began with the thought that it should convey something of my experiences in America. So I hit upon the idea of bringing together poems that related to that country, either from visits, or because my imagination had been fired by stories of my paternal grandfather’s travelling and working there between the two wars. ‘Worlds Apart’, the first poem in my first collection, begins with his going to and returning from Chicago. This established the principle for the selection, because it too involved visits and returns to America. Living in Japan for eighteen years also brought American culture more nearly into my experience because of the way that the country had been marked by Coca-Cola colonialism since the post-war occupation – as in ‘Coat Hanger’, where Frank O’Hara and Jasper Johns’ connections with Sendai are referenced. That’s how the two sections of Japan-based poems came in as a focal point of the book. For most of those eighteen years in Japan I had no base in England, and during vacations we would live in Parma, Italy, where my wife is from – but I’ve never been able to stay for anything longer than three or four months in the country at any one time, so my relations with the place are very much shaped, in my mind at least, by Giorgio de Chirico’s enigmas of arrival and departure. That produced the fourth section. So then it was a question of how to present some poems set in the UK, to include a smattering of new ones, so the last section is shaped around returns to my birthplace while in that economic exile and then returns to Italy following our two-year hiatus from visiting caused by the pandemic.
It was probably inevitable that the focus on America would branch out into sections on other places, given how much you’ve travelled in your life.
I was moved around a lot when young, so finding my feet in new places was an early and repeated experience, but all those moves were over short distances in Lancashire. I didn’t get south of Birmingham until I was sixteen, only crossed the Channel for a few days at seventeen, and was deep into my twenties before I flew anywhere. However, from my mid-thirties, thanks to difficulties in finding suitable employment and in my private life, everything changed: I became only too familiar with long haul flights in 747s and having affective ties in three countries. People have asked me in the past if and how my poetry changed, and, insofar as it has, this will be what did it, not least because, as I found in 2007 when returning to the UK, you can always go back, but you can never go back all the way.
I want to come back to travel and your life living outside the UK, but before that, considering this is your first American collection, how have you found thinking about your poems entering that poetic context? Which American poets do you find particular affinity with?
American poetry has been important from the beginning, and it would be good to think that this indebtedness is at least acknowledged by Return to Sendai. Before I went to University, I had bought a slim Selected Poems by Robert Lowell as well as T. S. Eliot’s selection of Ezra Pound. There wasn’t much poetry in our house, but my dad’s 1938 paperback by Gwendolyn Murphy entitled The Modern Poet: An Anthology contained work by Eliot and Pound, plus e. e. cummings, H. D., Vachel Lindsay, Don Marquis, Marianne Moore, John Crowe Ransom, Laura Riding, and Elinor Wylie, so I’d read something of them too. Arriving at university in the early 1970s meant encountering the wave of American poetry that had been impacting on poetic styles in the previous decade, so I read a lot of Olson and Dorn, as well as finding out about the Objectivists and discovering principally Zukofsky and Oppen, which also involved becoming familiar with William Carlos Williams. ‘Afterwards’, the brief elegy for Pound from 1973, and ‘Worlds Apart’ from 1976 both exemplify this early reading. The latter is an attempt to combine my familial take on the subject matter of Charles Tomlinson’s ‘John Maydew: or The Allotment’ with an inwardness, voicing, and spaciousness drawn from Ed Dorn’s ‘On the Debt my Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck’ besides other poems of his. While at university I attempted some poems in syllabics along the lines of Moore’s ‘The Steeplejack’. None of these survive, but one of them was called ‘Howarth and Saltaire’, employing the contrasts in Wuthering Heights to write about those two places near Bradford. During my gap year before beginning a PhD in Cambridge, I encountered Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency and Lunch Poems and was later introduced to most of the New York poets. A much later discovery was Elizabeth Bishop, who became very important when I had some long-distance travelling of my own to address. There are a great many others I’ve learned things from such as Edna St Vincent Millay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Weldon Kees, Charles Simic and August Kleinzahler – or Donald Justice, who I tuned into when his Collected Poems were published early this century.
You mentioned Charles Tomlinson there as a mediating figure, someone we share an interest in. I’ve always admired his visual sensibility which he developed through his other life as a painter. Across the collection, many of the poems you’ve chosen respond to sculptures, paintings and exhibitions. Could you talk about how visual art has informed your poetry? Do you find the looking and paying attention required by these mediums has helped your poetic eye, even when you are simply ‘gazing out the window,’ as you put it in ‘The Galleries’?
It’s impossible to make art of any kind if you don’t have the capacity to experience life, intermittently at least, as having an aesthetic feel and, from that changed appearance, potential meanings beyond the literal sense. This sort of effect can occur in a variety of ways, and I can’t imagine I’m alone in experiencing such moments, as when a song playing on a car radio can bring back a memory or have its mood projected across the landscape through the windscreen.
A Pater-like openness to experiences?
Maybe something like that, though these days I don’t do much burning with a hard, gem-like flame! It happens almost unfailingly to me in art galleries if I glance through a window after having had my sensibility worked upon by looking intently at paintings. The sensation quickly passes but is highly memorable and connected with seeing life not so much as a mass of circumstantial happenstance but a composed whole. The other thing that getting close to paintings will do is to heighten sensitivity to edge, outline, texture and detail, which again can enhance experience of everyday environments. Writing poems for me is a matter of alighting on details, coordinating them, and shaping them into an unpredictable yet still complexly reassuring whole with a music that also gives a feel to the ensemble. Alongside these broader considerations, there’s naturally the influence of looking at lots of art over a lifetime and having a good visual memory both for places visited, and paintings seen there or elsewhere. But something similar could doubtless be said for the role played by a headful of phrases and rhymes from innumerable poems in several languages, as well as vast numbers of the lyrics from songs, and the resources of everyday speech in a variety of Englishes.
That attention to details and connections is also evident in the ways your poems explore the act of ‘return’, which we often think about as being about nostalgia, but for you I think is as much about revisiting, looking again, refining, rethinking, as well as remembering. The collection’s title suggests this has been particularly significant for how you think about your time in Japan.
The book’s title came from maybe the first time my family and I sang karaoke together. It was 2005 and we were leaving Sendai definitively after fourteen years. We had taken a car ferry to Nagoya on our way to Kyoto. It was a great experience: there was a hot-spring-style bath, so you could sit and steam while watching the container ships go by through a porthole, and there was a karaoke box where among the songs we sang was Elvis Presley’s ‘Return to Sender’, and we would change the chorus to ‘Return to Sendai’ as we sang. So it is in part a family joke, a joking title. I first used the phrase in ‘All Times Are Local’, written in Reading and dedicated to my younger daughter for whom leaving Japan had been very difficult. The book’s title poem, which reuses that phrase, was written during our July 2017 return to the city when we were staying near to where our visiting foreign teacher accommodation had been. It’s dedicated to one of my old students, Miki Iwata, now a professor in Tokyo, who wrote an extraordinarily illuminating essay, ‘Topophilia in Tohoku’, published in the collection edited by Tom Phillips in 2021 about the poems I wrote there, and especially ‘Last Resort’. One of my life-and-vocation-defining poems is called ‘There Again’, and you’re quite right: as Adrian Stokes puts it in ‘Living in Ticino’, ‘To explain anything we go back.’ It’s also true that you can’t make reparations or amends, revisions or refinements, apologies or attempted self-reforms if you don’t return upon yourself and your history – so this going back to go forward is central: Highway 61 Revisited, and all the other poetic and literary ‘revisiteds’ immediately come to mind.
It must have been particularly acute going back in 2017, then.
Well, to give you a flavour of the issue for us with Sendai (until recently the place I had lived longest in my entire life), when we were walking through the middle of town on that return I happened to exclaim that I couldn’t see why we ever left, which rather exasperated my wife who had suffered years of my complaining about not being able to escape the golden cage of our economic exile.
The easy realism of an imagined life! The title poem also captures how returning somewhere significant is always a confrontation with change, particularly when you write about discovering the accommodation you lived in has been ‘since demolished’, leaving you feeling ‘like those fourteen years had been abolished.’
‘Return to Sendai’ was begun while staying in the Japanese house of an old lady who befriended us when our daughters were very small. She is still alive and in her late nineties, living just a few minutes from that foreign teachers’ housing, now no longer there. We had visited this padlocked area, but, as the poem hints, while my wife and Mrs Aizawa’s daughter climbed over to see the site, I stayed outside and contemplated the changes. That poem came quite quickly partly because it embeds memories of two unpublished pieces, one written when we were still living in Matsunami-cho (Pine-wave-town, approximately), inspired by discovering that ‘matsu’ in Japanese can mean both ‘pine tree’ and ‘to wait’. It’s a pun employed in a famous Noh play, and there is the felicitous accident that ‘pine’, as noun and verb, in English almost catches the two senses of the Japanese homophone. The other, dedicated to Paul Vlitos (who took over from me as visiting lecturer when we left in 2005), was written soon after returning to the UK when he told me that they were demolishing our old accommodation. ‘Return to Sendai’ is itself a returning to those two unpublished drafts while reflecting on other ‘verses’ that I could only have written because of our residence there with its views towards Miyagi Bay which, because the windows too had been demolished, could no longer be seen from that angle. Going back to Japan after ten years on a four-month fellowship was an ideal way to appreciate all the good that being there had done while allowing the daily irritations and feelings derived from that cultural exile to dissipate and be replaced for the most part by gratitude. Sendai is the place where I was granted the time and space to become myself, and it’s to Hiroshi Ozawa that I owe it all, because it was he who heard me give a paper on ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ and thought to invite me to take up the post of visiting lecturer there in 1991.
Marjorie Perloff has emphasized that feeling of ‘exile’ in your poems that you’ve mentioned, describing you as writing from ‘the position of exile.’ Does that ring true for you when you look back over these poems? How do you think it manifests in them?
I am very grateful to Marjorie for two things about the book, one of which relates to post-publication revision, because she kindly pointed out after I’d sent her a copy of The Returning Sky around the time of its publication in 2012 that the broad street in Los Angeles is not called Wiltshire, but Wilshire Boulevard. She must have composed her blurb to the book during the last year of her life, which was also such a generous thing to do. I imagine that the exile theme struck a chord with her, given her own complex history and relationship with Austria. But for me it’s difficult to get this question of ‘exile’ into focus. I was a sort of economic migrant for those years in Japan, because it came about through my failure to secure a university position during the 1980s; but the frame of mind which has made me occasionally feel ‘foreign everywhere’, and what prompted the line about being ‘exiled from our exile’ in the title poem, they may well go back to my childhood when I was moved between parishes at the ages of less than two, a bit more than three, then nine, and then fourteen, at which point, some five years later, I was off again to university. Perhaps the best way to think about this ‘exile’ theme – which, as I say, won’t clearly resolve for me – is to relate it to what encouraged a ‘participant-observer’ tendency, something doubtless helpful to poetic perception, but not especially encouraging of the sense that you are at home in the world.
Even when abroad, you’ve also remained a ‘participant-observer’ of Britain and that finds its way into your poetry in various forms. You write memorably in ‘CrossCountry’ about being ‘on this later train taking / in the marginal and left behind / constituencies’. You’ve mentioned moving around the country a lot when you were young. How has that shaped your work?
I was born into an industrial north-west of England which had been badly knocked about by the Luftwaffe, and whose sites of destruction were quite visible. It was already a world that in some respects had seen better days, though Liverpool was still a thriving port when we moved there in the year of Suez. I began attempting to write poetry towards the end of the 1960s and have been shaped in all sorts of ways by its art and music and optimism. But then the poems really start coming in the mid-1970s and are inextricably involved in unemployment and the need to move south, like so many of the people in my school – Simon Rattle, the most prominent – to fulfil themselves and fund a life. At which point Margaret Thatcher helped create the conditions which I left behind in going to Japan in 1989. So I was out of the country throughout the ‘cool Britannia’ period, returning just in time for the Credit Crunch, austerity, Brexit and now. Not easy to sum up all that potential shaping, but I can sense in it a core belief in the transformative power and value of art confronting ever deepening conditions in which such artistic urges are repeatedly occasioned and yet hardly granted the space to be heard. Britain’s changing fortunes, I’m sure, may have thus helped shape the poems in a great many ways, and at the heart of that might be the desire to answer the question that the country finds it difficult to face: what is its – and its citizens’ – true relation to the rest of the world? My interests in European history, poetry, art and culture, the time spent in two of the countries against which my parents’ generation fought a global war, the interest in American culture as not distinct from its sources in Europe, Asia, and the Spanish-speaking countries to its south, reading the poetry of anglophone Commonwealth countries without any cringe from contrast with Britain, they might all be part of an attempt to imagine an answer to such a question.
You mentioned Brexit as one of those significant events to occur on your return to Britain and I wonder how that affected you? Poems like ‘Balkan Trilogy’ and others from the Ravishing Europa selection in Return to Sendai make clear that at the time you felt Brexit was a devastating blow. How has it affected your poetry, do you think? Has it changed what you think poetry is able to do?
‘Balkan Trilogy’ began to take shape almost immediately after I heard the result of the referendum. Invited to a conference in Montenegro, I was attending papers in languages I didn’t understand and started sketching a sonnet without any set metrical scheme based on the auditory association of ‘breakfast’ and ‘Brexit’. That would eventually become the central section of the three-part poem. The referendum’s outcome, which none of us there could believe had happened, came to feel, over the next couple of days, like a terrible bereavement: as if my relations with the outside world, with my immediate surroundings, had been suddenly complicated beyond recognition. It had been instructive, just a day before, to travel from Croatia, which is in the EU, through Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose language is written in Cyrillic and which is not in the EU, into Montenegro, also outside, but with a language written in the alphabet. It didn’t take long after beginning to digest the breakdown of the results, how the cities and the young, and the other nations had, for the most part, voted to Remain, that I started to fear the Balkanization of the British Isles. There was much talk, after all, of Scotland becoming independent and opting to return to the EU, and the position of Northern Ireland remains anomalous. That’s how the first part of the poem came to be added, while the third evokes a visit to the seaside on our way back to Croatia and the flight back home. There, in that coastal setting, as we continued to talk about what had happened and why, the mourning and melancholia of it all started to descend. That’s how the third part began to form, which then was, if I recall, also written when back in the UK.
Do you continue to feel Brexit’s impact?
Yes, I do. I’ve had a ‘residence permit’ issued by the Italian government for the last quarter of a century and have the kind of Italian identity card issued to foreign residents. Italy is part of the Schengen area, and passport control officers in Germany, Switzerland, and of course Italy have confirmed for me that this history of official permission to reside in Italy means that I don’t need to have my British passport stamped, indicating a ninety-day right to visit, when I enter political Europe. But recently when we were taking the Eurostar to Paris, a French passport controller insisted that my Italian identity card had no bearing whatsoever on my entering France on a British passport (though if you travel from Italy to France by car no one stops to check any documents, so I have been ‘smuggled’ into France by in-laws on several occasions). These may be trifling but emblematic irritations regarding the self-inflicted incoherence of Britain’s relations with its nearest neighbours. The impact this has had on my poetry has been dramatic in that I unintentionally found myself with a rich vein of inspiration, and a further sense of feeling alienated from the only country in which I can call home, insofar as I can anywhere. And yes, it has intensified my sense that poetry is one of the ways of doing things with words, especially in those areas where something painful has happened and there is not a great deal else you can do about it. The need in human life to assert and sustain counterfactuals to enable beneficial change is where poetry comes into its own: which is one reason why my first published sequence of poems is entitled ‘The Benefit Forms’.
Do you think poetry is also a way of doing things with words with others? That poetry is, can be, perhaps should be, a communal affair. It’s striking how often your poems are dedicated to people, many of them fellow poets or, as you’ve mentioned, students.
I do. In fact, I am of the conviction that without this communal dimension, poetry, and lyric poetry especially, will be short-circuited, as it were, and fail to do anything. Without a reader or a listener incorporating and activating the poem’s sound sense, its process and movement, the change in awareness it seeks to enable, then we wouldn’t be able to do anything with poems. My poetry is premised on the promise it can make to a specific interlocutor, even if one not named by means of a dedication, and via that located exchange, to innumerable other possible exchanges with further anonymous readers. There can be losses and gains in these unpredictable transactions, of course; but I particularly enjoy Miki Iwata’s essay on my Sendai poems because it unearths, for one instance, things about the adapted haiku that begins ‘Last Resort’ (‘For the ones who go and those about to stay, / two autumns’), unearths things which I couldn’t possibly have known. I misattributed it in a note – by repeating my source’s mistake – to Buson when it was actually written by Shiki (who edited Buson’s works). Shiki is addressing the future novelist Natsume Soseki, and her essay also contains Miki’s discovery that the haiku poet had visited and written about the same hot spring resort where my poem is set. Her reading takes ‘Last Resort’ beyond what its author could have possibly known or intended, but in ways that are entirely appropriate to the possible implications of its text. Hers is an original but also a just interpretation and I feel extremely grateful for the way in which the poem has taken on a life of its own under this well-informed reader’s eyes. It exemplifies how a poem can come back to its author in better shape than when first sent on its way.
Given the intense polarization that seems to define our present moment, does poetry then offer a way of getting beyond those divisions? Or does that risk an overly romantic view of what poetry is capable of?
It’s very important, as you suggest in your question, that we don’t have too high expectations of what can or can’t be done with poems. But if you phrase it as ‘what can be done with poems’, then to me the question of agency is appropriately in place. Poetry – in itself – isn’t capable of anything, and in saying that I might merely be agreeing with Auden’s notorious pronouncement in his elegy for Yeats. But I’m not, I don’t think, because poems, like W. S. Graham’s ‘implements in their places’ or Vittorio Sereni’s ‘human instruments’, are written by people for people. They need to be read or listened to by people too. It’s in the transactions of this art that all manner of things can be done, and though the collaborative activity required for this to happen sets the conditions quite high for doing things, by the same token, it implies that if things are done then those conditions will likely be in place. My view is that poems can’t force or guarantee anything, but they can promise, convey and deliver things if, and only if, readers are open to reciprocally understanding the promise and realizing in themselves how it is fulfilled. In that way polarizations might be eased and channels of communication opened even if my description does suggest that people will need to want them for poems to be of any help. Still, there’s no reason, none that I know of, why poems can’t contribute to such an outcome, and I would much prefer to live in a culture where the possibility is acknowledged, and such readers are ready and waiting.
W. J. Davies is a writer and critic. His essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in various print and online publications including the Times Literary Supplement, Exacting Clam, Poetry Birmingham and Review 31. His most recent book is the essay collection Samuel Beckett’s Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2022), edited with James Brophy.
*****
Peter Robinson: Three Poems
RETURN TO SENDAI
for Miki Iwata
Beyond a rusted, padlocked gate
at Matsunami-cho
where for years I’d wait and pine,
under its branches’ long wave curve
what with the Lawsons convenience store
and local supermarket gone,
it’s really like there’s no such zone.
Beyond the rusted, padlocked gate
at Matsunami-cho
where our flat block’s since demolished,
although you say those lines of mine
have a place in the place’s story,
I’m far too old to clamber over.
It’s like those fourteen years had been abolished.
Beyond this rusted, padlocked gate
at Matsunami-cho
a risen sun would alter all
moving across its scuff-marked parquet,
souvenirs of elsewheres on each wall.
Here two daughters came to life,
and we played ‘nothing but blue skies’ in the dawn.
Beyond that rusted, padlocked gate
at Matsunami-cho
we’ve been exiled from our exile
under the pine wave’s broken curve
and pushing through rucked, buckled asphalt
even here the summer grasses
show deep-buried traces –
like those verses of mine from some thirty years ago.
LAST RESORT
For the ones who go and those about to stay,
two autumns: they’re turning decay
in another of the spa towns money forgot
to contradictory signs and tokens –
like ripened apples or purple potatoes,
dropped leaves borne down-river, for ever
alighting to drift where the ducks sun themselves.
And I gaze at deserted bed- and bath-rooms
of bankrupted hotels …
Their proprietors had nothing else to do but walk away.
Where, once upon a time, there were stories to tell
now it’s all maybe, maybe and perhaps
for ones bitten by mosquitoes
at a terraced vantage point
with smoke columns rising from rice-field fires,
the ones who must endure this season’s
boredoms, its nervous collapse;
they’re fretful about what, not leaving, they’ll miss
and grieve for younger selves, ones
long-squandered on a promise,
and gaze at those hotels like scuttled battleships.
BALKAN TRILOGY
in memory of Geoffrey Hill
‘prega per l’Europa’
Vittorio Sereni
1. Passport Stamps
There’s something about those rock outcrops
along the tops above Dubrovnik,
bloodied, fallen oranges
in the moat around what was Ragusa –
something about a switchback mountain
road that leads inland
(mist rising from a reservoir lake
after temperature-changing rain,
bridge pillars emerging from it
as if from out of nowhere) –
something about an exclamation-mark road sign
when we cross more Dayton borders
and the words
switch back and forth between Roman and Cyrillic –
there’s something can’t but point towards
past damage, harms to come …
2. Nikšić Hotel
Like a convalescent from this month of claim
and counterclaim, I falter
coming down to breakfast, seeing as the same
worn carpet would soon alter
when overwhelmed by risen shame
I find no shelter
from the Montenegrin sun’s heat, or from casting blame
in a welter
of muffled shouts, disorientation,
hearing news that wrecks it –
plain omelette, bread and tea become
tasteless as the one word: nation …
Not knowing where to turn for home,
I return to my room through the door marked EXIT.
3. Herceg Novi
As at a bereavement, when those harms
from your loss are falling
into place with relief like some more evening breeze,
under the prom’s transplanted palms
beside seafront concessions
there come, among raucous darts of starlings
at dusk above the old town’s eaves,
sensible inward migrations …
so from a balcony, soon after sunrise,
no less at home, you see
spectral headlands jutting into isolated sea
and can hardly believe your eyes.
June 2016
The High Window 