This is Robin Robertson’s fourth collection of poetry and the third to win one of the Forward prizes, this time for the Best Single Poem: ‘At Roane Head’. This is the penultimate poem in The Wrecking Light and contains in miniature many of the themes that run throughout the book: the sea, changes both physical and mental, the thin line between man and nature, sex, death and sorrow. There is strangeness in all of Robertson’s poems, as though the world is being viewed through a fogged window: the scenery his writing inhabits is at once recognisable and wholly other.

This obsession with the liminal can be found in the very words he uses: ‘blur’, ‘flinch’, ‘vanishing point’, ‘slur’. These are poems of half-light and alterity. There are two translations of Ovid included, a poet Robertson has turned to in previous collections, but as well as direct homage the Metamorphoses provides something of a touchstone for many of the poems in this and previous books. Woodlands and shorelines become the scenes of transformation while ghosts and spirits haunt the living. At times the all-pervading darkness of the poems can become a little tiring; the poem ‘Fall From Grace’, for example, is somewhat adolescent in its tone: “The black glass of a window / shines back at me its shame // at all the times and all the places / where I pitched my life in shadow”.

However, at his best Robertson is able to conjure talismanic images with startling precision in carefully weighed language: “Under / the false-teeth-whistling flight of a wood pigeon / a thrown wave of starlings rose and sank itself / back into a hedge, in a burst of chatter.” (from ‘The Plague Year’). Most of the poems follow no strict metrical system, but instead rely on an elevated speech-pattern, as though spoken in the slow and grave tones of a seer. This usually means that the sentence structures work against the line-endings quite violently, encouraging a prose-rhythm in reading: “Only you / lived through / the sea’s truth, survived / the unknown, the / unfathomable darkness”.”

Admirers of his previous collections’ style will not be disappointed by the new offering, many of the pieces would not have been out of place in his previous and much-lauded book, Swithering. Robertson, in fact, is somewhat remarkable for the constancy of his approach. His first book, A Painted Field, announced the arrival of a fully-formed poetic-style and a writer with a recognisable and mature voice, due perhaps in part to the decade-or-so advantage of age over many first-collection poets. It will be interesting to see whether his work in the future will take a new direction, certainly his imagination shows no signs of drying up, but it would be refreshing to see it rendered in new ways.

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