In these forty-two poems, Robin Robertson demonstrates a range of style and concerns, in a voice utterly original. Whether he is rendering a dramatic new version of Ovid ("The Flaying of Marsyas"), celebrating the ambiguous pleasures of food ("Artichoke"), or considering a British soldier's presence on Irish soil ("Jack-in-the-Green"), Robertson's poetry is always lucid, sensuous, and compelling. Here are poems that speak of the wounds of memory, the implacable coupling of desire and loss, the fugitive nature of things. The collection ends with "Camera Obscura, " an extended poetry cycle. Here Robertson counterpoints the imagined diary of the pioneering Victorian photographer David Octavius Hill with a contemporary poetic narrative of Edinburgh to portray a life in crisis and the last flowering of the Scottish Enlightenment.
- ISBN10 0151003661
- ISBN13 9780151003662
- Publish Date 8 April 1998 (first published 21 February 1997)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 9 September 2008
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Imprint Thomson Learning
- Format Paperback
- Pages 104
- Language English