A Painted Field

by Robin Robertson

This prize-winning first collection introduced one of the most powerful and original new voices to come out of Scotland. In language both dense and resonant, grave and lyrical, these poems are concerned, in the end, with

the fugitive nature of the implacable coupling of desire and sadness, beauty and loss.

‘A superb debut . . . darkly chiselled poems haunted by mortality and the fragility of life’s pleasures’

Kazuo Ishiguro, Sunday Times , Books of the Year

Genres: Poetry, Contemporary

176 pages, Paperback

First published April 8, 1998

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

[Steve]

I wanted to rate this higher, since the collection does have some fine poems, with some rugged images and language that bring the landscape of Scotland to life. Sort of like Braveheart meets Trainspotting, though that's an overstatement on both ends. Anyway, you get a sense of history, as well as a contemporary bleakness in these poems. Where this collection failed for me, was in the last third of the book, which is devoted to a long sequence titled Camera Obscura. This sequence mixes diary entries, letters, poetry, and history. I usually enjoy such efforts, but in this case, the events the sequence is built on didn't resonate with me at all. The poems within the seqence were good, but I didn't understand the context, even with the endnotes.

[Mir]

Tinsel

Tune to the frequency of the wood and you'll hear
the deer, breathing; a muscle, tensing; the sigh
of a fieldmouse under an own. Now
listen to yourself -- that friction -- the push-and-drag,
the double pulse, the drum. You can hear it, clearly.
You can hear the sound of your body, breaking down.
If you're very quiet, you might pick up loss: or rather
the thin noise that losing makes -- perdition.
If you're absolutely silent
and still, you can hear nothing
but the sound of nothing: this voice
and its wasting, the soul's tinsel. Listen... Listen...

[Lara]

To be read by anyone who's been in Scotland - and particularly Aberdeen, as nowhere else does the phrase "italic rain" apply more aptly...

[Emma Filtness]

Beautiful, haunting and visceral, but not quite as memorable as The Wrecking Light, I look forward to reading more by Robertson.

[Cheryl]

NEW GRAVITY

Treading through the half-light of ivy
and headstone, I see you in the distance
as I'm telling our daughter
about this place, this whole business:
a sister about to be born,
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.

These poems are hit or miss for me; I love feeling and seeing and hearing the ocean and nature poems, somehow making me long for the kind of storms we don't get where I live, on the darker side all around.

STATIC

The storm shakes out in sheets
against the darkening window:
the glass flinches under thrown hail.
Unhinged, the television slips its hold,
streams into black and white
and silence as the lines go down.
Her postcards stir on the shelf tip over;
the lights of Calais trip out one by one.

He cannot tell her
how the geese scull back twilight,
how the lighthouse walks its beam
across the trenches of the sea.
He cannot tell her how the open night
swings like a door without her.
How he is the lock,
and she is the key.

STORM

Faulted silence, dislocation,
Heat in the hissing trees;

June tightens to a drumhead
That the rain begins to beat.

Pavane, charade, scherazade.
The tatoo drills and drums

the masque through crystal;
frost and ice foreseen in sudden glass.

The rain-curtain rises to a hard silence
And the fresh world emptied like a drain.

PIBROCH

Foam in the sand-lap of the north-sea water
fizzles out - leaves the beach mouthing -
the flecks of the last kiss
kissed away by the next wave, rushing;
each shearing over its own sea-valve
as it turns with a shock into sound.
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
my hands amongst its foam.

THE TRANSLATOR

He will go west
And west again,
Striking out on his own
In open water.
Sewing the surface,
one quarter man
three quarters verb,
fitting his turbulence
to the undertow.

[Jayant Kashyap]

There are definitely poems here that, when seen as lonely, standalone pieces, a reader can consider average in performance and/or presentation, but when a writer does sequences, their talent is judged by how well-done a sequence of theirs is—which, in Robertson’s case, is certainly well-done. Not implying here that his individual poems not endlessly re-readable, note “the spider in a milk bottle,/ cradling the swaddled fly,/ rocking it to sleep” (At Dusk, p.28)—the almost cruel beauty in the eyes of the observer.

[Kevin Isaac]

What a deep, dark journey into the soul and psyche of human experience , staring a reflection of self or maybe a ghost of your past self. Demonstrating an astonishing range of style and concerns-Scottish, in a voice that is utterly original. My heart breaks from the letters in Camera Obscura . Loved it!

[Jim]

A masterful first collection of forty-two poems by the Scottish poet Robin Robertson, who may prove as talented and, hopefully, productive as Seamus Heaney.

Of the twenty-five or so volumes of poetry that I've read in the past several months, this is my favorite.

[Matthew]

Great stuff, all of it. I drove up and down the length of New England for six months with Robertson's Fugue for Phantoms pouring off my tongue and never once fell asleep at the wheel.

[Emma Richler]

Just wonderful.

[Andrea Renfrow]

Simply beautiful. I absolutely loved "Static" as well as many others from this collection.