Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems

by Robin Robertson

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.

Genres: Poetry

208 pages, Hardcover

First published September 11, 2014

About the author

There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads catalog. This entry is for Robin ^3 Robertson.

Robin Robertson is from the north-east coast of Scotland. His four collections of poetry have received the E.M. Forster Award and various Forward Prizes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_R...

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are intensely felt poems with amazingly inventive and surprising language you would never have thought of on your own, but that communicates an immediately perfect sensation. The admiring review in the New York Times Book Review is well deserved, although the poems are darker than I expected.

Robertson was born in northeast Scotland, and much of his poetry includes references to the wild, harsh and beautiful landscape there. But it is always connected to human affairs. There are hard times here, but always the language allows the reader a way into the emotion and a way to understand how to live with the mistakes we and others make.

The Lake at Dusk

I watch the day break down
over the lake: wind
looting the trees,
leaving paw-prints on the water
for the water-witch to read.

With the pass of a hand
it stops,
and the scoured lake
lies pewter-still
in a red, raking light, now
hardening to mirror.

Rinsed after the rain,
the forest is triggered and tripwired;
when I pause for a bird call
the silence takes time
to reassemble around me
like a dream retrieved.
No one will find me here.

...

There are also several versions of Actaeon’s myth, versions of Ovid, and also versions of Dionysian poems from Nonnus. Myths and landscape of Scotland invest many poems, so that a burr runs throughout, but not at all in a folklore sense--more of a ‘it’s a way to survive a damned hard life’ sense. I have to say, I admire these poems very much, but they make me very glad my ancestors got driven down from the crofts to the sea several generations ago, with getting on the boat to America the only choice they had. Too hard a life for me.

The Fishermen’s Farewell

Their long stares mark them apart; eyes gone
to sea-colours: grey, foam-flecked

and black in the undertow, blue
as the blue banner of the mackerel, whipping west.

On land, they are smoke-walkers, where each stone
is a standing stone, every circle a stone circle.

They would be rumour if they could, in this frozen
landscape like a stopped sea, from the great stone keels

of Callanish to the wall of Dunnottar and Drum.
They would be less even than rumour:

to be ocean-stealers, to never throw a shadow--
to dream the blank horizon and dread the sight of land.

The drink storms through these men, encompasses
them, till they’re all at sea again.

Their houses, heeled over in the sand:
each ruin now a cairn for kites.

And down by the quay
past empty pots, unmended nets and boats:

this tiny bar, where men sleep upright
in their own element, as seals.

[Nicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first collection of poems I have ever read (ashamedly so) and therefore I have nothing to compare them too.
I was going to give 4* however I find myself reading back over many of them, bookmarking a dozen and listening to an hour of Robin Robertson reading his poems on YouTube, so that is probably counted as a win in the poetry stakes.
Often in these poems it is a verse or a sentence, haunting, musical or so descriptive that stands out.

Favourites: Static, Fireworks, Aberdeen, Fall, The Park Drunk, The Wood of Lost Things, At Roane Head, The Fishermen’s Farewell.

[Johan Thilander]

Som mest angelägen är Robin Robertson när han närmar sig myterna - sviterna om Actaeon och om Dionysos, samt de skotska folksagor som jag tidigare läst i hans Grimoire (dikten At Roane Head är samlingens höjdpunkt).

Läst under en långhelg i Edinburgh tillsammans med min fru.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a little stunned by these poems, from the muscularity and intensity, from the chosen words put together unlike any I have seen before, about the aliveness of the ocean and his country felt deep within. The overall effect is of new ideas and images that is sorely needed in these times, and that woke up parts of my brain, language and emotion centers, that have been quiescent for a while. The overall academic poems were masterful, but I appreciated more the lines in certain poems that resonated. He is a sensual poet, and honestly, had some erotic poems that were effective and the least cheesy I have ever read.

I read this in a forest, and I read it in a desert, and the mainly moody Scottish highlands and moors and oceans juxtaposed nicely with my surroundings, and made me forget where I was, where the sun had that muscular intensity on my skin, and the words on the page.

New Gravity
..how a life’s new gravity suspends in water.
Under the oak, the fallen leaves are pieces
of the tree’s jigsaw; by your father’s grave
you are pressing acorns into the shadows to seed.

Static
He cannot tell her how the open night
swings like a door without her,
how he is the lock and
she is the key.

Aberdeen
…the water mullioned with light. The sifting rain,
italic rain; the smirr that drifted down for days; the sleet.
Your hair full of hail, as if sewn there.

Pibroch
And how I long now for the pibroch, pibroch long and slow,
lamenting all this: all this longing for the right wave,
for the special wave that toils behind the pilot
but can never find a home – find my edge to crash against,
my darkness for its darknesses.

Moving House
…the crush of waves on a windowed shore.

Apart
We are drawn to edges, to our own parapets and sea-walls:
finding our lives in relief, in some forked storm. Returning
with our unimaginable gifts, badged with salt and blood,
we have forgotten how to walk. Thinking how much more
we wanted when what we had was all there was;
looking too late to the ones we loved, we stretch out
our hands as we fall.

Maroon, Over Black on Red
She stood at his burnt windows
until she saw herself
answered in their dark, the way
glass gets blacked
at night in a lighted room.
She went home, pulled the curtains;
drew a red bath.

March, Lewisboro
A salting of snow, blown across the white table of the lake

Exposure
Rain, you said, is silence turned up high. It has been raining
now for days. Even when it stops there is still the sound
of rainwater, labouring to find some way into the ground.
Silence is rain with the sound turned down, and I stare
out now on a clear view of something left out on the line.

Sorrows
He was uncomfortable, so I asked the nurse if we could lift him higher.
He died an hour later. Usually happens, she explained, after you move them.

Hide
I have been waiting for the black deer all my life,
hidden here in the dark corner of the wood. I see
glimpses of them, breaking cover, swinging away
to erase themselves in the deep trees. They are
implicit there, and will move only if I hold still.
Though in a dream I have they stand so near
I can feel them breathing. Then, when I look down,
I have disappeared. Out at the wood’s edge, the snorts and
coughs of the feeding herd. A gust startles a lift of leaves,
and they scatter and bound like the far-off heads
of deer in the distance. The wind drops and the trees are antlered.

Fall
after Rilke
The leaves are falling, falling from trees
in dying gardens far above us;
as if their slow free-fall was the sky declining.
And tonight, this heavy earth is falling away
from all the other stars,
drawing into silence.
We are all falling now.
My hand, my heart, stall
and drift in darkness, see-sawing down.
And we still believe there is one
who sifts and holds the leaves,
the lives, of all those softly falling.

The Park Drunk
The thorned stems of gorse are starred crystal;
each bud like a candied fruit, its yellow picked out
and lit by the low pulse of blood-orange riding in the eastern trees.
What the snow has furred to silence, uniformity,
frost amplifies, makes singular: giving every form a sound,
an edge, as if frost wants to know what snow tries to forget.

Trysts
meet me where the sun goes down
meet me in the cave, under the battleground
meet me on the broken branch
meet me in the shade, below the avalanche
meet me under the witch’s spell
meet me tonight, in the wishing well
meet me on the famine lawn
meet me in the eye of the firestorm
meet me in your best shoes and your favourite dress
meet me on your own, in the wilderness
meet me as my lover, as my only friend
meet me on the river bed

Primavera
I could walk to you now with
Spring just ahead of me,
north over flat ground
at two miles an hour,
the sap moving with me,
under the rising grass
of the field like a dragged magnet,
the lights of the flowers
coming on in waves
as I walked with the
budburst and the flushing of trees.

Crossing the Archipelago
Rising in November in these days of dusk I am one life older,
watching now as the walls green over, the stones break into bud;
if this is ebb-tide turned to flood it means that nightfall
might begin again at dawn. And so it does.
The sea at Djurgården is a mirror of lost light.
I watch snowflakes fall on water, transparent as tissue,
melting back to nothing, the black water’s endless echo of the night.
A diminished life turns turtle and the day breaks like a spell;
to double back on this, through ash and silver birch,
to that extinguished past, a world that’s over, will wreck me.
Hopeless to return now: my future lit by bridges,
and their burning.

Holding Proteus

Becalmed here on this salt beach far from home, my boat
blisters and flakes in the sun; it has forgotten the sea
as I have forgotten the sea’s purpose, which is
to change. Sea-voyager, law-maker, warrior,
I walk in my own footprints now around this island, around myself,
waiting for wind, trying to hazard the heart’s meridian,
a draught of air, a star to steer by.
My hands have been still for so long

Signs on a White Field
I snick a stone over the long
sprung deck to get the dobro’s glassy note,
the crying slide of a bottleneck,
its tremulous ululation to the other shore.

The House of Rumour
after Ovid
At the world’s centre
between earth and sky and sea
is a place where every sound can be heard,
where everything is seen.
Here Rumour lives,
making her home on a mountain-top.
This house stands open
night and day: a dome
of apertures and windows set
like a million eyes at gaze,
steady, unblinking,
no doors or shutters anywhere.
Her walls have ears.
They are ears. The whole house
made from thinly-beaten,
resonating bronze, hums
constantly with words repeating back to themselves
round and round, again
and again: the low susurration
of echoing sound.
No silence anywhere,
just the murmur of voices
like whispering waves
or the last low rolling crush of thunder.
The house is haunted by shadows,
ghosts that come and go, a host of rumours,
the false mixed with the true,
words and phrases, fact, fictions,
fabrications, all confused.
At every turn, a story spreads
and grows and changes,
each new teller adding on to
what they’ve heard.
Here is surveillance, interception;
a multitude of recording angels.
Here lives rash Credulity, reckless Error,
groundless Joy. Whispers make their home
here, alongside sudden Sedition,
tremulous Fear.
Rumour herself hears everything,
sees everything that happens in the heavens,
in the sea or on the earth;
invigilator, sentinel, echo-chamber,
she misses nothing
misses no one as she sweeps the world.
Finding the Keys
The set seed and the first bulbs showing.
The silence that brings the deer.
The trees are full of handles and hinges;
you can make out keyholes, latches in the leaves.
Buds tick and crack in the sun, break open slowly in a spur of green.
The small-change colours of the river bed:
these stones of copper, silver, gold. T
he rock-rose in the waste-ground finding some way to bloom.
The long spill of birdsong. Flowers, all turned to face the hot sky.
Nothing stirs. That woody clack of antlers.
In yellow and red, the many griefs of autumn.
The dawn light through amber leaves and the trees are lanterned,
blown the next day to empty stars. Smoke in the air;
the air, turning.
Under a sky of stone and pink faring in from the north
and promising snow:
the blackbird. In his beak, a victory of worms.
The winged seed of the maple,
the lost keys under the ash.

Signs on a White Field
A living lens of ice; you can hear it bending, breathing,
re-adjusting its weight and light as the hidden tons
of water swell and stretch underneath, thickening with cold.
a low grumble, a lingering vibrato, creaks that seem to echo
back and forth for hours; the lake is talking
A pencilled-in silence, hollow and provisional.
The green leaf looks back, and sees a man walking out
in this shuddering light to the sound of air
under the ice, out onto the lake,
among sun-cups, snow penitents:
a drowned man, waked in this weathering ground.

Diving
The elements imitate each other:
water-light playing on these stones
becomes a shaking flame;
sunlight stitches the rock-weed’s rust and green,
swaying, sea-wavering; one red twist
scatters a shoal like a dust of static –
a million tiny shocks of white dissolving
in the lower depths. The only sound
the sea’s mouth and the ticking
of the many mouths that feed within it,
sipping the light. Dreaming high over the sea-forest –
the sea-bed green as a forest floor –
through the columns of gold and streams of water-weed,
above a world in thrall, charting by light
as a plane might glide, slowly, silently over woods in storm.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah the SOUND!!! Robertson's poems are an aural feast unlike anything I've read in modern poetry. It was an inspiration to read a poet who gives such exquisite attention to snick and snack soul sound of every word he uses. Compiled in a book like this, the effect can actually be overwhelming at times, and I also do need to point out that there are some poems here which don't belong among the other greats. Poems like "Venery" and "Wonderland" feel like throwaways to me. This is odd in that this is a selected poems. Those made the cut at least twice now.

But the gems here are worth the price of admission. Listen to a few lines from "By Clachan Bridge":
I remember the girl
with the hare lip
down by Clachan Bridge,
cutting up fish
to see how they worked;
by morning's end her nails
were black red, her hands
all sequined silver..
She unpuzzled rabbits
to a rickle of bones,
dipped into a dormouse
for the pip of its heart.
She'd open everything,
that girl."

That's an example where Robertson's content OF the language is just as compelling as the sound of his language. But there are other times when Robertson can "get by" on auditory brilliance alone as in this stanza from "Fireworks":

In the small lake, what had once been water
now was seamed with smoke,
marbled and macular,
dim and deep as wax,
with each stick and twig like a spilled wick
in the dulling hollow of the sconce:
metamorphosis in the cackled pond.

There's a mythic darkness to many of the poems in this collection. I came away from it feeling heightened by the grandeur of the language but heavier from the grimness of Robertson's vision. In some cases, as in the wonderful "At Roane Head," it helps to know the Celtic mythology with which Robertson is playing. That poem in particular is enjoyable and has merit on its own. But when I did a little research to learn it was a take on the Celtic myth of the Selkie (creatures which swim as seals but become human on land by shedding their skins), the poem obviously took on a different feel. The poem ends with the line "Then she gave me the sealskin, and I put it on." This obviously means something VERY different once you're aware of the myth. This left me feeling a little distant from Robertson. I am positive there are lots of other allusions I'm not getting. Many are no doubt due to my ignorance of certain mythologies; but at my age I also trust myself as a reader and I'm distanced a little by Robertson's disregard for his reader's comfort. Some poets meet us where we are. Some have us travel to them for the fortune of standing in their glow. The best meet us. Robertson is not necessarily part of the middle group, but he's related. But then he writes lines like these from "1964" and I'm silent:

On the floor of the butcher's,
blood has rolled through the sawdust
and become round and soft.
We found the blood-buds
in corners as the shop was closing, and gathered
the biggest ones in handkerchiefs to take them
to the woods, break them open for their jelly.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a marvelous collection! This was my first exposure to Robertson's poetry, and I am very impressed. Both the sea and the forest feature prominently in his works (hence the title?), but his sea poetry is especially sublime (v. "Aberdeen," "Pibroch," and "The Fishermen's Farewell"). His riff on Rilke's "Herbst" (one of my favorite poems) in "Fall" is masterful. Mining Ovid and Nonnus for inspiration, he demonstrates his classical chops in a way few contemporary poets could hope to match (v. "The Death of Actaeon," "Dionysus in Love," and "Dionysus and the Maiden"). He handles metaphor with subtlety, sensuality, and grace (v. "Artichoke" and "Wedding the Locksmith's Daughter"), and "The Hands of a Farmer in Co. Tyrone" will blow you away. Master of melancholy (v. "New York Spring," "Donegal," and "Crossing the Archipelago"), Robertson's poetry can be very personal and yet evocative of the memories we each carry within us. His use of meter, enjambment, alliteration, and assonance always adds to the meaning and experience of his poetry. I could teach a class on writing poetry using this volume as the only text. My only regret is not having found his poetry sooner.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lyric, deeply moving muscular powerhouse of a collection. Robertson's poems are filled with with deeply vivid emotional and physical landscapes, interspersed with mythos and tales far off the paved portions of the Scottish experience. There are books that are so wonderful that they center and transport a reader at the same time, and this is one of them. Highly recommended.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goddamn. Just go watch this video for a taste: At Roane Head

[Anna]

I must have started this ages ago, because I know I read some of it, if not most of it, but I guess the pandemic has deleted portions of my brain, so let's say this is a partial reread.

For a book called Sailing the Forest, I feel like there aren't enough poems about the forest. Robertson shines when he's writing about the delicate and ferocious whipsaw of the woods. But then - the book veers into anger. Anger at women seems to be a very prevalent theme. (It does make me wonder if this book was written post-divorce). Women, mostly, are unnamed and interchangeable, so much so that at times he mentions his daughters and his lovers in the same breath; at times, the daughters metaphorically become the lovers. Women are described as their parts: "that soppy smell, that / briny, cowrie-shell tang" (in reference to the scent of a vagina). Perhaps it's best summed up with this line, ostensibly written from a character:

"I hate women but desire them -
hate them because I desire them.
The power they have."

When women are given a true role (At Roane Head), the poetry sings. (I can't get this particular poem out of my head.) It's fitting then that there are so many Greek-mythology themed poems (and they are good, since the story is there, tangible and established), since that, too, was a set of writing that discarded people.

Anyway, the poems about the woods, the antlers, the leaves, the walks, the stream, the smell, the moss, the darkness, the lichen, the rain - these are all very good. More sailing the forest, please, and less sheer rage at the impotency of man.

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robin Robertson is an extraordinarily talented poet, a master of the physical detail which can switch an emotional state in a heartbeat. He seems to be gifted with an almost preternatural sense of proportion married to vividness, such that his work neither reads as too arch nor too prosaic. It's a very difficult balance to strike.

This, a retrospective of 20+ years of his work is a fine representative compilation. His early, horrifying "The Flaying of Marsyas" is here, as is my favourite of his poems, "Dream of the Huntress":

It is always the same:
she is standing over me

in the forest clearing,
a dab of blood on her cheek

from a rabbit or a deer.
I am aware of nothing

but my mutinous flesh,
and the traps of desire

sent to test it—
her bare arms, bare

shoulders, her loosened hair,
the hard, high breasts,

and under a belt
of knives and fish-lures,

her undressed wound.
Every night the same:

the slashed fetlock,
the buckling under;

I wake in her body
broken, like a gun.

Erotic, disturbing, threatening, both desirable dream and nightmare, this is a fine example of its author's ability to combine subtle levels of meaning, visceral responses, and stark physical imagery. To have sustained such an ability for as log as he has marks Robertson out as one of the contemporary greats.

[Claire Blythe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. This collection is full of all kinds of strange and wonderful imagery. I never knew what was coming from one poem to the next.

There were a few poems that didn’t quite resonate with me so this is a 4/4.5 out of 5 stars. Then I listened to Robertson reading some of his poems on YouTube and damn. The way he speaks each word, drawing out certain syllables and sounds, really drag you in to each poems story. I think I’ll slowly search out a reading of each one to listen to.

Recommend? Yes, absolutely. If you’re looking for fantastic poetry with such unique imagery, read this. Then read it again.

[Evelyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

A selection of poems in different genres by the author. The book includes poems inspired by nature, and Greek and Scottish myths. The themes of others include, love, passion, despair and death. A few are horror stories, and appear better suited for a Stephen King anthology than a compilation of poetry.

Many of the poems were obtuse. Only a few connected with me. As a result I found this analogy to be an unsatisfactory read.

It rates 2.5 stars.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robin Robertson reads like a Scottish Robinson Jeffers mixed with the lyricism of some like Seamus Heaney, which means there is a love of nature paired with aural layering throughout the works. This collection I slowly savored for nearly a decade, returning to it often and sitting it down to go about life and other reading. Must read for fans of lyric poetry.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

Absolutely enchanting.

[Cierra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well-crafted and organized poetry no doubt. However, it just wasn’t my cup of tea. I found a majority of the poems boring and they didn’t grasp my attention.

[R.C. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely a lot of wonderful play on language, and some lovely turns of phrase, but there was never any poems that grabbed me and demanded I keep it. I found myself skipping through. Some poems were too opaque, some were too tired in subject, some were too vague, and there's no better way to lose me than to write poems about ancient/mythical figures and/or casual sexual assault, but that's just me.

[Gabriel Guerin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un recueil beaucoup plus classique/académique/érudit que ce à quoi je m'attendais au départ. Être familier avec la littérature gréco-latine est certainement un petit plus pour le lecteur qui voudrait se lancer dans la lecture de cet ouvrage. Je suis même certain que de petites merveilles stylistiques se cachent du côté de la scansion et de la métrique si on pousse l'analyse des poèmes un peu plus loin (avis aux amoureux du trimètre iambique et autres tétramètres trochaïques).

En même temps, pas obligé d'être un expert d'Ovide ou d'Hésiode pour apprécier les renversements de perspectives, les jeux de miroirs ou les croisements inusités entre l'ancien et le moderne qui se déploient à chaque page. Le langage de Robertson est précis, cru, souvent pointu, tandis qu'il nous fait tanguer sans arrêt entre des images d'une violence assez musclé merci et des tonalités versant PRESQUE dans le bucolique (à défaut d'avoir un autre mot).

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wanted to read the poetry of the man who got Irvine Welsh out of the slush pile.

Not bad, but not much good either. Has strong similarities to the work of Ian Hamilton.

Did like 'Sorrows', 'Waves' and 'Beginning to Green' however.