Peter Robinson (poet) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Peter Robinson is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

born in Salford, Lancashire

Lancashire

Lancashire is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England. It takes its name from the city of Lancaster, and is sometimes known as the County of Lancaster. Although Lancaster is still considered to be the county town, Lancashire County Council is based in Preston...

Life and career

With the exception of five years spent in Wigan, Peter Robinson grew up in Liverpool

Liverpool

Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...

. He graduated from the University of York

University of York

The University of York , is an academic institution located in the city of York, England. Established in 1963, the campus university has expanded to more than thirty departments and centres, covering a wide range of subjects...

in 1974. In the 1970s he edited the poetry magazine Perfect Bound. He helped organize several international Cambridge Poetry Festival

Cambridge Poetry Festival

The Cambridge Poetry Festival was an international biennale for poetry held in Cambridge, England, between 1975–1985. The festival was founded in an attempt to combine as many aspects as possible of this form of art...

s between 1977 and 1985, and was festival coordinator in 1979. He was awarded a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1981 for a thesis on the poetry of Donald Davie

Donald Davie

Donald Alfred Davie was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes.-Biography:...

, Roy Fisher

Roy Fisher

Roy Fisher is a British poet and jazz pianist. He was one of the first British writers to absorb the poetics of William Carlos Williams and the Black Mountain poets into the British poetic tradition. Fisher was a key precursor of the British Poetry Revival.Fisher was born in Handsworth, Birmingham...

and Charles Tomlinson

Charles Tomlinson

Alfred Charles Tomlinson, CBE is a British poet and translator, and also an academic and artist. He was born and raised in Penkhull in the city of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.-Life:...

. Among the most decisive events for his creative life, a sexual assault in Italy on his girlfriend in 1975 — which he witnessed at gunpoint — formed the material for some of the poems in This Other Life (1988) and provided the plot outline for an as yet unpublished novel called September in the Rain.

In the following decade he was one of the organisers of the exhibition Pound's Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy

Pound's Artists

Pound's Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy was an exhibition held in 1985 to mark the centenary of Ezra Pound's birth....

at Kettle's Yard

Kettle's Yard

Kettle's Yard is an art gallery and house in Cambridge, England.- History and overview :Kettle's Yard was originally the Cambridge home of Jim Ede and his wife Helen. Moving to Cambridge in 1956, they converted four small cottages into one idiosyncratic house and a place to display Ede's collection...

and the Tate Gallery

Tate Gallery

The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...

, co-edited the magazine Numbers

Numbers (magazine)

Numbers was a literary magazine published twice a year in Cambridge, England, between 1986 and 1990. Six issues of the magazine appeared, of which the last was a double issue to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of the American poet and novelist Janet Lewis...

and was advisor to the 1988 Poetry International at the South Bank Centre

South Bank Centre

Southbank Centre is a complex of artistic venues in London, UK, on the South Bank of the River Thames between County Hall and Waterloo Bridge. It comprises three main buildings , and is Europe’s largest centre for the arts. It attracts more than three million visitors annually...

, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. After teaching for the University of Wales, Aberystwyth

University of Wales, Aberystwyth

Aberystwyth University is a university located in Aberystwyth, Wales. Aberystwyth was a founding Member Institution of the former federal University of Wales. As of late 2006, the university had over 12,000 students spread across seventeen academic departments.The university was founded in 1872 as...

, and at the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

, he has held various posts in Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

. His most extended employment, from 1991 to 2005, was teaching English Literature

English literature

English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

and English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

as a second language at Tohoku University

Tohoku University

, abbreviated to , located in the city of Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture in the Tōhoku Region, Japan, is a Japanese national university. It is the third oldest Imperial University in Japan and is a member of the National Seven Universities...

in Sendai

Sendai, Miyagi

is the capital city of Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, and the largest city in the Tōhoku Region. In 2005, the city had a population of one million, and was one of Japan's 19 designated cities...

, Japan. He underwent a successful brain tumour operation in 1993 while his first marriage was failing. He remarried in 1995 to an educationalist and now has two daughters. In 2007 he returned to the UK to take up a post as Professor of English and American literature at the University of Reading

University of Reading

The University of Reading is a university in the English town of Reading, Berkshire. The University was established in 1892 as University College, Reading and received its Royal Charter in 1926. It is based on several campuses in, and around, the town of Reading.The University has a long tradition...

. Since returning to Reading, as well as leading research at the university on poetry and poetics, he has organized a centenary conference on the work of the poet Bernard Spencer

Bernard Spencer

Charles Bernard Spencer was an English poet, translator, and editor.He was born in Madras, India and educated at Marlborough College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Marlborough he knew John Betjeman and Louis MacNeice; at Oxford Stephen Spender, and he also came across W. H. Auden. He...

(1909–1963) and instigated the publication of an annual creative arts anthology. He is now also poetry editor of the Two Rivers Press.

A regular contributor of book reviews and literary criticism to poetry magazines, academic journals, and newspapers, Peter Robinson has presented and discussed his work in many parts of the world, giving readings in Los Angeles and Chicago, Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima and elsewhere in Japan, Vienna (Austria), Milan, Parma, and Massa Marittima (Italy), Paris (France) and all over the United Kingdom. He has also taken part in programmes on BBC Radio Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Bristol, and Merseyside, as well as on BBC Radio Three.

Critical reception

Peter Robinson’s earliest published poetry was fortunate to receive numerous notices, including one in which the poet and novelist James Lasdun

James Lasdun

James Lasdun is an English author, poet and academic. Lasdun was one of the judges for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize.-Career:...

observed that ‘he is a poet, and one with a sensibility which, if attuned only to a somewhat limited range of experience, is unusually refined’ in Siting Fires 1 (1983). The best of these early reviews was Eric Griffiths’ in PN Review 35 (1983), which described Robinson as ‘in my judgement, the finest poet of his generation’. The publication of This Other Life (1988) brought his work to the attention of the national press for the first time with Martin Dodsworth in the Guardian (Friday 13 May 1988) describing the book as ‘grave and deliberated…beautiful and mysterious too’, Rachel Billington’s singling it out in the Financial Times (20 Feb 1988), and its being named a ‘Book of the Year’ in the Sunday Telegraph (4 Dec 1988). Stephen Romer described it as ‘love poetry of an exemplary kind’ in the Times Literary Supplement (19 Aug 1988) and John Kerrigan found in it ‘a miracle of balance’ in the London Review of Books (13 Oct 1988).

Highlights of the subsequent decade were provided by John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

’s characterizing his poetry, along with that of other younger writers, as ‘curiously strong’ in PN Review (1993), while Peter Swaab, again in the TLS (4 Sept 1998) noted its ‘staying power’. James Keery published the first attempt to articulate this evolving oeuvre’s underlying themes in ‘Marred in a way you recognize’ in PN Review 126 (Mar-April 1999), and the first appreciation in a critical study came with Sumie Okada’s ‘A Sense of Being Misplaced’, Western Writers in Japan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). Robinson’s many years working in that country made it difficult for him to maintain a profile in the British poetry scene, but his work continued to receive attention, and the publication of his Selected Poems (2003) prompted a number of reviews including a welcome by Patrick McGuinness in the Poetry Review (Winter 2005), a review in The Japan Times (20 Oct 2003) by David Burleigh, and one in Romanian by Catalin Ghita.

His current critical standing was underlined by the publication in 2007 of The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, a collection of fourteen essays with a bibliography (1976–2006), edited by Adam Piette and Katy Price. The volume includes a preface by Roy Fisher

Roy Fisher

in which he observes: ‘Thus the life-events don’t provide the driving force of the poems; rather they make up the terrain, a varied surface across which the poet travels, living his life but always exercising a strong disposition to make poems from somewhere close to everyday events. It’s as if 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. These are not the ordinary urgencies of autobiography, but they are the urgencies of new creations’ (p. 22).

More recent responses to Robinson’s work are Ben Hickman’s in Jacket, and Tom Phillips’ in Eyewear, while Ian Brinton features his observations on the art in Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry since 1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). His poetry has also been translated into German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.

Alongside his poetry, Peter Robinson's ancillary activities have also received widespread critical attention. The translations of Vittorio Sereni

Vittorio Sereni

Vittorio Sereni was an Italian poet, author, editor and translator of Jewish heritage. His poetry frequently addressed the themes of 20th century Italian history, such as Fascism, Italy's military defeat in World War II, and its postwar resurgence.Born at Luino, Sereni graduated from the...

were described by Charles Tomlinson

Charles Tomlinson

Alfred Charles Tomlinson, CBE is a British poet and translator, and also an academic and artist. He was born and raised in Penkhull in the city of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.-Life:...

in The Independent (1990) as 'versions that possess an uncanny accuracy, true to the fragmented, self-communing, smouldering and combustible humanity of Sereni's work'. Choosing The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems (2002) as a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, Douglas Dunn

Douglas Dunn

Douglas Eaglesham Dunn, OBE is a Scottish poet, academic, and critic. He currently lives in Scotland.-Background:Dunn was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire. He was educated at the Scottish School of Librarianship, and worked as a librarian before he started his studies in Hull...

wrote that 'the range is eclectic without being scattered confusingly across too many languages and cultures. For me at least, much of this work is new' while Glyn Pursglove, reviewing the book in Acumen, found that Robinson's 'attempted fidelity is not allowed to distort his own use of English and English verse and there is a great deal to admire and enjoy here. Indeed, one could wish the book a good deal longer.' John Welle called the translations of Luciano Erba (2007) 'marvelously attuned ... accurate, carefully crafted, and in harmony with the idiom and spirit of the originals.' They were awarded the 2008 John Florio Prize.

Peter Robinson's literary criticism began to gain national attention when Donald Davie

Donald Davie

Donald Alfred Davie was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes.-Biography:...

reviewed In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets (1992) in the London Review of Books noting that 'Robinson deserves every credit for forcing his way into the thickets.' Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen (2002) was welcomed by Andrea Brady in Poetry Review when she remarked that 'The conviction, pleasures and gratitude of committed reading are evident in this affirmation of the poetic contract between readers and writers.'Angela Leighton summed up his critical contribution in her review for the Times Literary Supplement of Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations (2005) when she wrote that 'Robinson has been a generous promoter of contemporary poetry for decades, and this collection of essays bears witness to his dedication and energy. He writes with an unformulaic enthusiasm, moving easily from biographical, political and poetic context to the nitty-gritty of close reading, while also striking an easy, readable tone'. Five years later, in the same journal, Justin Quinn found that Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible (2010) was 'Vigorously and wittily argued ... an excellent and provocative contribution to a complex debate.'

Poetry

The Benefit Forms (Lobby Press: 1978)
Going Out to Vote (Many Press: 1978)
Overdrawn Account (Many Press: 1980)
Anaglypta (Many Press: 1985)
This Other Life (Carcanet: 1988) Winner of the Cheltenham Prize ISBN 0 85635 737 5
More about the Weather (Robert Jones: 1989) ISBN 0 9514240 9 (hardback) ISBN 09514240 1 7 (paperback)
Entertaining Fates (Carcanet: 1992) ISBN 0 85635 975 0
Leaf-Viewing (Robert Jones: 1992) ISBN 0 9514240 2 5
Lost and Found (Carcanet: 1997) ISBN 1 85754 176 6
Via Sauro Variations (Ridgeback: 1999)
Anywhere You Like (Pine Wave: 2000)
About Time Too (Carcanet: 2001) ISBN 1 85754 510 9
Selected Poems 1976-2001 (Carcanet: 2003) ISBN 1 85754 625 3
Ghost Characters (Shoestring: 2006) ISBN 1 904886 25 6
There are Avenues (Brodie: 2006) ISBN 0 9542649 5 9
The Look of Goodbye: Poems 2001-2006 (Shearsman: 2008) ISBN 978 1905700 45 5
Ekphrastic Marriage (Pine Wave: 2009) with artworks by Andrew McDonald
English Nettles and Other Poems (Two Rivers Press: 2010) illustrated by Sally Castle ISBN 978 1 901677 65 2 (hardback)
The Returning Sky (Shearsman: 2012) Poetry Book Society Recommendation ISBN 978 1 84861 186 3

Prose

Untitled Deeds (Salt Publishing: 2004) ISBN 1 844710 44 0
Spirits of the Stair: Selected Aphorisms (Shearsman: 2009) ISBN 978 1 84861 062 0

Translations

Six Poems by Ungaretti (Plain Wrapper: 1981) with Marcus Perryman
Selected Poems of Vittorio Sereni (Anvil: 1990) with Marcus Perryman ISBN 0 85646 204 7
When I was at my most beautiful and other poems by Noriko Ibaragi (Skate: 1992) with Fumiko Horikawa ISBN 0 9515 1452 0
The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems (Worple: 2002) Poetry Book Society Recommendation ISBN 978 0 9539 4774 4
Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (Chicago UP: 2006) with Marcus Perryman ISBN 978 0 226 74878 8 (hardback)
The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (Princeton UP: 2007) Winner of the John Florio Prize ISBN 978 0 691 12763 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 691 12764 4 (paperback)
Poems by Antonia Pozzi (One World Classics: 2011) ISBN 978 1 847 49185 5

Criticism

In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets (Oxford UP: 1992) ISBN 978 0 19 811248 8
Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen (Oxford UP: 2002) ISBN 978 0 19 925113 1
Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations (Oxford UP: 2005) ISBN 978 0 19 927325 6
Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible (Liverpool UP: 2010) ISBN 978 1 84 631218 2

Interviews

Talk about Poetry: Conversations on the Art (Shearsman: 2006) ISBN 978 1 905700 04 2

Editor

With All the Views: Collected Poems of Adrian Stokes (Carcanet and Black Swan: 1981) ISBN 0 85635 334 5
Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (Open University Press: 1985) ISBN 0 335 10588 2
Liverpool Accents: Seven Poets and a City (Liverpool University Press: 1996) ISBN 978 0 85323 671 2
The Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Studies (Liverpool University Press: 2000) with John Kerrigan ISBN 978 0 85323 525 5
News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher (Stride: 2000) with Robert Sheppard ISBN 1 900152 67 3
Mairi MacInnes: A Tribute (Shoestring: 2005) ISBN 978 1 904886 10 5
An Unofficial Roy Fisher (Shearsman: 2010) ISBN 978 1 84861 120 7
Complete Poetry, Translations & Selected Prose of Bernard Spencer (Bloodaxe: 2011) ISBN 1 85224 891 2
Reading Poetry: An Anthology (Two Rivers Press: 2011) ISBN 978 1 901677 72 0
A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens (Two Rivers Press with the English Association: 2012)

Secondary Bibliography

The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson edited by Adam Piette and Katy Price (Salt: 2007) ISBN 978 1 84471 244 1

External links

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