Hill of Doors
Author(s): Robin Robertson
Charged with strangeness and beauty, Hill of Doors is a haunted and haunting book, where each successive poem seems a shape conjured from the shadows, and where the uncanny is made physically present. The collection sees the return of some familiar members of the Robertson company, including Strindberg -- heading, as usual, towards calamity -- and the shape-shifter Dionysus. Four loose retellings of stories of the Greek god form pillars for the book, alongside four short Ovid versions. Threaded through these are a series of pieces about the poet's childhood on the north-east coast, his fascination with the sea and the islands of Scotland. However, the reader will also discover a distinct new note in Robertson's austere but ravishing poetry: towards the possibility of contentment -- a house, a door, a key -- finding, at last, a 'happiness of the hand and heart'. Magisterial in its command and range, indelibly moving and memorable in its speech, Hill of Doors is Robin Robertson's most powerful book to date.
Product Information
'Robertson's lines have the luminosity of myth. The Wrecking Light is a work of extraordinary visionary power, its music bleak and beautiful, spare and unsparing' Adam Newey, Guardian 'The Wrecking Light is wholly convincing and the poems are written with a cold, exacting and imaginative awe ... this surely will be one of the outstanding collections of 2010' Paul Perry, Irish Times 'An impressive addition to one of the most powerful bodies of work on the contemporary scene ... The intensity and seriousness with which Robertson pursues his poetic vocation bear comparison with the magisterial figure of Robert Lowell' David Cooke, Poetry London 'The poet Robin Robertson's The Wrecking Light is my favourite Scottish book of the year: thunderingly powerful and as peaty as Laphroaig' Nick Barley, Scotland on Sunday Books of the Year 'Robertson's poetry is, in Wallace Stevens' sense, "the cry of its occasion", deeply felt but with a stern music interposed between poet and reader ... Robertson's world is a mixed realm of magic and reality, past and present, enchantments and dis-enchantments ... The work of a highly musical poet at the height of his powers' Brian Morton, Scottish Review of Books
Robin Robertson is from the north-east coast of Scotland. His four previous collections have received a number of honours including the E.M. Forster Award and various Forward Prizes.
General Fields
- :
- : Pan Macmillan
- : Picador
- : 31 January 2013
- : 197mm X 130mm
- : United Kingdom
- : 01 April 2013
- : books
Special Fields
- : Robin Robertson
- : Hardback
- : 1
- : 821.914
- : 96
