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’. www.robertsaxton.co.uk
Robert Saxton writes:
Book blurbs tend to be balanced and general, and therefore rather bland sometimes, so I thought it might be of interest to potential readers of my new poetry collection, Against Gravity, if I offered some miscellaneous notes on the thinking behind the poems.
I’m thoroughly Elizabethan, like my late friend David Best, to whose memory this book is dedicated: we were born in the year of the late Queen’s accession. So I chose to begin with a villanelle about Elizabeth II. Royals appear on banknotes but distance themselves from actual money — that explains the first of the two refrains. The Queen was reported as commenting that the smell of paint followed her around the nation as factories, schools and the like tended to spruce up their premises before Her Majesty’s visits – that explains the second refrain.
I’ve tried to make many of these poems speak to each other, often in pairs. Hence the afore-mentioned royal villanelle is followed by one about a humble home, maybe on a council estate. My poem about not shining in creative company is followed by a satirical take on poetry workshops (‘The Egg Problem’). There are two poems about war; two that mention the papacy. And so on.
I imported two poems from my version of Rilke’s Book of Hours, as I felt I needed some general poems about death to accompany the elegies to my father, mother and friend. Most of the poems in the Book of Hours are about God but these two aren’t: I thought it would be interesting to isolate them from their usual context of personal devotion.
Sometimes the pairings relate to form – hence the two adjacent ottava rima poems, ‘The Egg Problem’ followed by ‘The Bodyline Bride’: first high Eng-Lit culture, then gossipy fashion commentary.
The indentations and rhyme scheme of ‘The Lie Detector Telephone’ are borrowed from George Herbert, ‘The Collar’. I’m a Larkin fan, and have taken the verse form of ‘Abstracts’ from ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, though it’s shorter.
The verse form of ‘Lost and Found’, with its broken lines (two per four-line stanza) carrying the only rhymes, was chosen unconsciously. But after writing the poem I realised that it mimics the construction of my Muffin the Mule marionette, which has jointed front legs but fixed hind legs.
‘The School of Athens’ is about the Raphael painting featuring Plato, Aristotle and other thinkers. Aristotle’s comment about the oak tree looks forward, arguably, to the section on trees called ‘Of Dawn and Dew’.
Many of the poems are dramatic monologues. This means that sometimes the reader can’t tell, when a poem appears to be autobiographical, if it really is – I rather relish this teasing element. ‘Strange Meeting’ is fictional with just a few personal details (sleep apnoea, grief for lost parents) – I mention this so friends don’t feel impelled to make a compassionate intervention.
There are quite a few ‘triplet’ poems, rhyming, eg, cat, fit, kit, where the last rhyme word rhymes consonantally with the first rhyme word (pararhyme) and conventionally with the second. I’ve used this form ever since I stumbled upon it in Manganese, my second collection. I like the way this pattern makes the last rhyme word in each stanza clinchingly inevitable.
The final 68-stanza poem, ‘Orlando’, bookends Queen Elizabeth II at the beginning of the book with another woman of history, Vita Sackville-West, at the end. This is the poem I’d like to be remembered by. I inhabit the viewpoint of a 15-year-old Danish girl, though I’m also present in her elderly friend Mr Frome (the girl is an avatar of my friend Anna, who is half my age); and because I wrote ‘Orlando’ as a gift for her I borrow the mantle of Virginia Woolf too (Orlando the novel was written as a gift for Vita). The gender change makes me Orlando as well, in a way (in Virginia’s novel he wakes up as a woman). So I manage to occupy four different personae – I suppose this is what makes the poem special for me. The ending imagines Vita in the past imagining the future: I liked this layering of time.
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An ‘Orlando’ diary
My new collection Against Gravity (May 2026) ends with a 68-stanza poem spoken in the voice of a 15-year-old Danish girl, Annika, who travels from her home in Denmark to visit Vita Sackville-West’s famous garden at Sissinghurst, in Kent, with her much older friend, whom she calls Mr Frome. I wrote the poem as a birthday gift for my friend Anna Martin, an American living in England. The age difference between Annika and Mr Frome reflects the age difference between Anna and me. The poem was my response to a customised photo book that Anna had given me for my birthday, entitled Bob and Anna in Gardens. My gift to her consisted of the poem as a printed pamphlet as well as a printout of a diary I wrote to record the writing experience. Here, for those interested in the process of poetic composition within a strict rhyming stanza form, is the diary in its entirety.
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