The Wrecking Light
Poems
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Scottish poet's fourth collection shimmers with "an oneiric charge and intensity" (Guardian, UK).
The Wrecking Light is an intense, moving, bleakly lyrical, and at times shocking book. These poems are written with the authority of classical myth, yet sound utterly contemporary. The poet's gaze—whether on the natural world or the details of his own life—is unflinching and clear, its utter seriousness leavened by a wry, dry, and disarming humor.
Alongside fine translations from Neruda and Montale and dynamic retellings of stories from Ovid, the poems here pitch the power and wonder of nature against the frailty and failure of human beings. This is a book of considerable grandeur and sweep that confirms Robertson as one of the most arresting and powerful poets at work today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Robertson's fourth collection is astonishing in its eclecticism; the poems touch on family, folklore, mythology, religion, travel, sex, shame, love, violence and nature. The book is divided into three sections "Silvered Water," "Broken Water," and "Unspoken Water" whose titles reflect Robertson's obsession with the sea and humankind's relationship with the natural world. In "Signs on a White Field," the narrator "walk out onto the lake./ A living lens of ice... breathing, readjusting its weight and light." In "Law of the Island," nature is no longer restorative but an instrument of torture: "Over his mouth and eyes/ they tied two live mackerel... and pushed him/ out from the rocks." A woman bears four sons in "At Roane Head," "web-footed... more/ fish than human" whom her husband eventually murders, "relaxing them/ one after another/ with a small knife." But it is "The Plague Year" that poses the question at the heart of this collection: "What is there left/ to trust but this green world and its god,/ always returning to life?"
