Slow Air: Poems [Hardcover]

Robin Robertson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2003

Strongly rooted in the wonders of the natural world, this collection of poems strikes a balance along the mind's boundaries, looking outward and inward. Combining a cool gaze with a precise clarity of expression, the verse is muscular and delicate, spare and musical. From "that net of birds / that moves / unloosened / under bridges at dusk" to "the sea / wrecking itself against the rocks," Robertson is a master of evocative depiction. Filled with an irrepressible zest for life, he traces the arc of loss, the search for grace, and the radiance and shadows of life with a subtlety that is at once exhilarating and sensual.

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

This Scottish writer and editor's second book of poems extends farther into the grim psychological territory mapped in his prize-winning début, "A Painted Field," examining the death of his father and some deeply disturbing dreams. Even more striking than Robertson's affinity for pain is his ability to tap into the uncanny, folkloric underside of nature poetry. He has the Romantic poet's way of finding a mirror for the self in the landscape: "A lift in the weather: a clemency / I cling to like the legend / of myself." Most impressive of all are poems after Rilke—Rilke's famous panther here "swings on the pivot of his numb and baffled will"—and poems based on Greek myths, in which we find a minotaur whose maze is a "house of many corners / but only one room."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Booklist

The earliest Scottish poem that is still popular, at least among poets, is "Lament for the Makars" by William Dunbar (c.1460-c.1530), which mourns the departed bards Dunbar considered his masters and peers. The poem is a literary memento mori, or reminder of death, one of a thematic artistic type pervasive in the Middle Ages and later folk cultures, including Dunbar's--and Robertson's--Scots culture. Consciousness of mortality suffuses Robertson's poetry, which utterly lacks the compensatory gather-ye-rosebuds-while-ye-may bonhomie that the Cavalier poets injected into England's poetry. His first masturbatory "liquefaction," Robertson says, "told [him] three things," the first of which was "that sex is death." That this revelation occurred "that summer, in a field" betokens the principal leavening of dourness in his work: his economical imaging of landscape, the seasons, the weather, and also of manmade detail--the elegy for Mark Rothko, "Maroon, over Black on Red," powerfully exemplifies his way with artificial materials. Although modern and unsentimental, Robertson conjures the bleak medieval and romantic aura of the existential darkling plain and barren heath. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151007462
• ISBN-13: 978-0151007462
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,374,216 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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