Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems

by Robin Robertson

Overview

A selection of poems spanning the career of a poet of the uncanny
Filled with haunting and visionary poems, Sailing the Forest is a selection of the finest work from an essential voice in contemporary poetry. Robin Robertson's deceptively spare and mythically charged work is beautifully brutal, ancient and immediate, and capable of instilling menace and awe into our everyday landscape. These are poems drawn in shadow, tinged with salt and blood, that disarm the reader with their precise language and dreamlike illuminations. Robertson's unique world is a place of forked storms where "Rain . . . is silence turned up high" and we can see "the hay marry the fire / and the fire walk."
Through five extraordinary collections, Robertson has captured the intangible, illusory world in razor-sharp language. "The genius of this Scots poet is for finding the sensually charged moment—in a raked northern seascape, in a sexual or gustatory encounter—and depicting it in language that is simultaneously spare and ample, and reminiscent of early Heaney or Hughes" (The New Yorker). Sailing the Forest reveals a wild-hearted poet at the height of his talents.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374535728
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/06/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Robin Robertson is from the northeast coast of Scotland. He has published five collections of poetry—most recently Hill of Doors—and has received numerous accolades, including the Petrarca Prize, the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and all three Forward Prizes. In 2006 he published The Deleted World, a selection of English versions of poems by Tomas Tranströmer, and has since translated two plays by Euripides, Medea and The Bacchae.

Table of Contents

From A Painted Field (1997)

New Gravity 1

Three Ways of Looking at God 2

Advent in Co. Fermanagh 3

Static 6

Sheela-na-Gig 7

The Flaying of Marsyas 8

Aberdeen 12

Pibroch 13

Fireworks 14

Jack-in-the-Green 16

Hands of a Farmer in Co. Tyrone 17

Moving House 18

Artichoke 20

Silver Lake, Vermont 21

The Immoralist 22

Shot 24

The Flowers of the Forest 25

Six Views from the Camera Obscura 26

FROM Slow Air (2002)

Apart 28

Wedding the Locksmith's Daughter 29

The Language of Birds 30

Maroon, Over Black on Red 32

March, Lewisboro 34

Break 40

Exposure 41

False Spring 42

Dream of the Huntress 43

The Thermal Image 44

The Long Home 46

Sorrows 48

Waves 50

Hide 51

Asterion and the God 52

Fall 55

From Swithering (2006)

The Park Drunk 56

At Dawn 57

What the Horses See at Night 58

Trysts 60

Primavera 61

The Death of Actaeon 62

Swimming in the Woods 68

Ghost of a Garden 69

Selkie 70

Wormwood 71

The Glair 72

Heel of Bread 73

New York Spring 74

Myth 75

The Lake at Dusk 76

A Seagull Murmur 78

Actaeon: The Early Years 79

Leavings 84

Donegal 85

La Stanza delle Mosche 86

Lizard 87

Crossing the Archipelago 88

Rainmaker 89

Holding Proteus 90

Trumpeter Swan 92

From The Wrecking Light (2010)

Album 93

Signs on a White Field 94

By Clachan Bridge 96

The Plague Year 98

Tulips 102

Wonderland 103

The Tweed 104

About Time 105

Cat, Failing 106

A Gift 107

Strindberg in Berlin 108

Venery 110

My Girls 111

Leaving St Kilda 112

Law of the Island 117

Tinsel 118

Lesson 119

The Wood of Lost Things 120

Middle Watch, Hammersmith 123

Beginning to Green 124

Easter, Liguria 125

Widow's Walk 126

Diving 128

Abandon 130

Hammersmith Winter 131

At Roane Head 132

From Hill of Doors (2013)

Annunciation 135

The Coming God 136

A Childhood 138

1964 139

Under Beinn Ruadhainn 142

Corryvreckan 144

A Quick Death 146

Dionysus in Love 148

The Fishermen's Farewell 155

The Halving 156

The Ghost of Actaeon 158

A & E 159

Falconer's Farewell 160

Strindberg in Skovlyst 161

The Cave of Sleep 166

Dionysus and the Maiden 168

The Shelter 171

Party time 172

Punchinello's Farewell 174

The House of Rumour 176

The God Who Disappears 178

Finding the Keys 180

Crimond 182

Glass of Water and Coffee Pot 183

Port na h-Abhainne 184

The Key 185

Notes & Acknowledgements 188

Editorial Reviews

…the first career-spanning gathering of poems from one of the most intriguing literary voices in Scotland…[Robertson] is not hip, and I mean that as a compliment. His work is accessible without being dopey, traditional without making him look like a fogy, and utterly free of fashionable snark. And somehow, the visceral language of a Robin Robertson poem has a way of feeling simultaneously luxurious and spartan. To put it bluntly, he writes lines that you want to read again and again…He writes poems about the body, and that's where they hit you, and that's where they seem determined to stay.

The New York Times Book Review - Jeff Gordinier

Trysts abound in Sailing the Forest, the first career-spanning gathering of poems from one of the most intriguing literary voices in Scotland . . . Robertson hasn't yet crossed over into the realm of mainstream adoration that Ireland's Seamus Heaney enjoyed among American readers, but that's probably only a matter of time . . . To put it bluntly, he writes lines that you want to read again and again.” —Jeff Gordinier, The New York Times Book Review

“During the first dark days of the year, and even now as the blue predawn light slinks in a little earlier each morning, I've been savoring Robin Robertson's haunting collection. These poems are sonically rich, studded with wordplay and flickering light. Because Robertson's Scottish, he's got materials we newfangled Americans only envy. He writes about selkies, who are Celtic shape-changers; dwayberries, a kind of deadly nightshade. And like Proteus himself, he can casually remake Ovid's stories in Scottish villages that already seem older than Rome.” —Tess Taylor, NPR

“Robin Robertson's Sailing the Forest is richly coloured and dense with archetypes. At nearly 200 pages, this generous selection of poems is a great introduction for anyone who believes contemporary poetry has lost its archaic power. Here are ballads, elegies, and legends that read like rites. Even if you've already discovered Robertson's dark music, this is a handsome edition to own.” —Fiona Sampson, The Independent Books of the Year

“It was something of a relied to turn at times to Robin Robertson's Sailing the Forest: masses of emotional intelligence here, and grace abundant.” —Richard Holloway, The Scotsman Books of the Year

“[Robertson is] prodigiously talented” —Candia McWilliam, The Scotsman Books of the Year

“The poetry event of 2014 was Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems, by Robin Robertson, which affords a longer view of this supremely gifted artist. Here is passion, savagery and tenderness, all combined and all controlled within a faultless technique.” —John Banville, Irish Times Books of the Year

“Sailing the Forest by Robin Robertson is a wonderfully generous selected poems. Great precision of language, limpid observation and a rare ability to make the narrative of the poems resonate evocatively. A ripple-effect that is remarkably profound.” —William Boyd, The Observer (UK)

“Sailing The Forest: Selected Poems by Robin Robertson – the only words more welcome as subtitle might be All the Poems. Read it, give it, read it aloud, give it to poetry agnostics and watch them shiver, touched by the poet's tinsel, his understanding of this light and that darkness.” —Candia McWilliam, The Herald (UK) Books of the Year

“Robin Robertson's bracing book offers a host of pleasures: rich and briny atmospheres, the burr and bristle of a fine ear, an eye restless for exact and searing detail. But the greatest of these is watching a writer come into his own, in poems increasingly compelling and large in their embrace, their dark and lustrous landscapes fully inhabited, fully haunted.” —Mark Doty, National Book Award-winning author of Fire to Fire

“Robin Robertson is one of the finest contemporary poets, as this collection amply shows. His is a wonderful hard clear music, and the muscularity and toughness of his verse is everywhere counterpointed by a deep-lying tenderness. Sailing the Forest is a marvellously buoyant vessel.” —John Banville, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea

“Each poem comes to us so cleansed of excess, so concentrated and perfectly pared down to its essence we can only wonder at the adamantine sharpness of its edges.” —Billy Collins

“Robertson is a superstar of Scottish poetry.” —Adam Newey, The Guardian

“There's an oneiric charge and intensity to many of these poems that builds to a fabular clarity of thought, which is at once precise in its particularity and placeless. Whether in his extraordinarily fresh renderings of Ovid or his own imaginings, Robertson's lines have the luminosity of myth. The Wrecking Light is a work of extraordinary visionary power, its music bleak and beautiful, spare and unsparing. If there were justice in the world, it would win every prize going.” —Adam Newey, The Guardian

From the Publisher