Description
Against Gravity: the title alludes to our struggle with mortality as we age and, by contrast, the pleasures of play, imagination, creativity. Robert Saxton’s latest poetry book is dedicated to a friend whose heart gave out on a Scottish mountain. But in counterpoint to the elegaic, it offers humour too, often with dark overtones.
The subject matter is wide-ranging – from the late Queen to the pitfalls of indexing, from Nero’s theatre to trouser suits for modern brides, from a bat roost in a Portuguese library to the Hollywood Sign. The book concludes with a visit to Vita Sackvillle-West’s garden at Sissinghurst, exploring intergenerational friendship as well as Vita’s visionary genius and unconventional love life. Wherever his focus falls, Saxton shows accomplished craftsmanship and an eye for telling detail, with surprises on every page.
Robert Saxton. Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, 104 pages, May 2026.
Praise for Robert Saxton:
‘Robert Saxton writes the best sestinas and villanelles since Auden—menacing but insidiously entertaining’—PETER FORBES, Editor of Poetry Review 1986 to 2002
‘The inside of Robert Saxton’s mind seems not to be much like any other poet’s, but he has sufficient élan to make readers see things his way’—HELEN DUNMORE
‘intellectually persuasive, tough-minded and strikingly outspoken … one heck of a craftsman, producing a dexterously sculpted poetry’—MATT SIMPSON, Orbis
‘mesmerising entertainment … formidably inventive’—JOHN GREENING, Times Literary Supplement
About the author: Robert Saxton was born in Nottingham in 1952. He read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he met his friend David Best, to whose memory this book is dedicated. He lives in north London and is currently a freelance editor and writer. He is the author of eight previous books of poetry and in 2001 he won the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association’s poetry prize for ‘The Nightingale Broadcasts’.
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