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Retrieving ‘Retrieved Attachments’ – Peter Robinson reflects on his latest poetry collection

Retrieving Retrieved Attachments

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Retrieved Attachments CoverWritten or revised between early April 2017 (‘Night in Nigawa’) and August 2021 (‘Behind the Shops’), the poems in Retrieved Attachments chronologically overlap with those in Ravishing Europa (2019) and Bonjour Mr Inshaw (2020). They are all parts of an evolving response to the turmoil through which we have been living, the one that has given us five prime ministers in the time it has taken me to write and publish three poetry books.

The first in this triptych of publications evidently concerns the fracturing of relations both within this country and with its neighbours, whether those in the British Isles or across Europe, caused by the consequences of the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union. The second is a tribute to the painter David Inshaw, who I first met in 1977, lost touch with, and was then fortunately able to renew our friendship some forty years later. Retrieved Attachments tries to address, among other things, the consequences of the first by employing themes from the second. It began to find its form through another meeting of friends separated for many years.

The origins of the book, though, are a four-month stay in Japan between April and July 2017, when I was a visiting professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, on the railway line from Osaka to Kobe. My wife and I hadn’t been back to the country where I lived between 1989 and 2007, and where our two daughters would spend their early years, for exactly a decade. I was in the middle of writing poems prompted by the breaking of relations that withdrawing from the European Union inevitably involved, and this four-month idyll in Japan came as an interruption in which much revisiting of old haunts took place, where old friendships were renewed, and new acquaintances made. It produced a set of poems that didn’t fit those in Ravishing Europa, whose poems were written both before, during, and after that stay. The Japan-based poems were being accepted for publication in magazines, but what would become of them beyond that I had no idea.

Book cover imageThe poems for David Inshaw were written in a rush of inspiration in the first months of 2019. Not long after they were drafted, someone else I’d lost touch with sent an email saying she had returned to England after many years living in Colombia, and perhaps we might meet. We did, on three occasions before the pandemic descended upon us, and from them came ‘The Revenants’ – which took me back to a poem I had written years before and not included in Collected Poems 1976–2016 (2017), one called ‘Imaginary Portrait’ from Entertaining Fates (1992), whose very addressee had just made contact out of the blue. I revised it to go with the new one and gave it the title ‘Retrieved Attachments’, getting the word ‘Retrieved’ from a posthumous gathering of uncollected Frank O’Hara called Poems Retrieved and ‘Attachments’ both from rummaging around in my laptop to find old drafts and the happy experience of being reunited with people lost for many years.

And it was the dawning realisation of implications in that phrase ‘Retrieved Attachments’ that helped bring together the five sequences which make up the book: the ones written during that return to Japan, those composed out of visits to Switzerland to see my elder daughter and her boyfriend who were attempting to make a life together on the outskirts of Winterthur, a sequence devoted to the district of Parma, Italy, where my wife comes from, written and revised when we couldn’t visit because of the pandemic, various elegies and other poems prompted by partings and losses, as well as a group written during the isolation in our house through lockdowns, when we were allowed out only to exercise, during which I really got to know my neighbourhood in Reading through repeatedly walking its streets and parks.

Living in different time zones, like being on the defeated side in a culture-changing political watershed, is likely to prompt thoughts along the lines of the what-if and might-have-been. It suggests the idea of times running in parallel, like trains on adjacent tracks, the one you are in which will take you wherever it goes, and the one you are not, but wanted to be or should have been on. This sort of theme, not planned, since that is not how the collection emerged, but detectable throughout, gains in definition with the later sections of the book and can be found fully formed in ‘Manifestos for a Lost Cause’, whose ambiguous title, borrowed from a painting by Paula Rego, points in the two directions that many of these poems straddle, like those two trains on parallel but diverging lines.

Retrieved Attachments is being published in what I hope is a new era of renewed relationships, meetings with friends and colleagues not seen for years because of the pandemic. I’ve spent much of my creative life thinking about what the formal orchestrations of poems can or might mean, and the tensions and conflicts I’ve been talking about provide the unshapely disorders that will naturally, in my case at least, prompt the urge to engage with the kinds of coordination in sound and rhythm that poetry foregrounds.

As my book comes out, it enters a world in which the threats of further conflicts and global depredation prompt calls for us to rebuild bridges, enter into new agreements, find accords in place of age-old difference. Fretted with some of the frictions and disappointments indicated above, these poems employ their orchestration to encourage such developments. ‘To explain anything we go back,’ Adrian Stokes writes in Living in Ticino, and if my new collection achieves that, well, perhaps it does so in order to take a great leap forward.

Peter Robinson

30 January 2023

 

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A Ballad Footnote – a poem by Peter Robinson

A BALLAD FOOTNOTE

‘that little tent of blue’

Oscar Wilde

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1

We’re driving east in the winter sun,

its rays, a reddish yellow dazzle.

Reality testing, phenomenal,

they’re splayed about the far horizon

 

and cast on walls a leafless shadow.

Up ahead, the gibbous moon

rises above built-environment neon

waxing in that tent of blue …

 

2

Then round the perimeter of Reading Gaol,

we pick out by its locked front entrance

an agent’s board with the words: FOR SALE.

 

But whether, behind, that remnant glow

or ahead this pallid, chilly distance

weighs and finds us wanting, I don’t know.

~

12 December 2019

Peter Robinson is the poetry editor for Two Rivers Press and teaches at the University of Reading. His TRP publications include Bonjour Mr Inshaw, The Constitutionals: a Fiction, and Foreigners, Drunks and Babies: Eleven Stories.

The Two Rivers Press illustrated edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol is available here.

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Poet of the Week – 6: Peter Robinson

TWO RIVERS PRESS POET OF THE WEEK 6: PETER ROBINSON

Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953 and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He is an internationally appreciated poet, whose Collected Poems was published by Shearsman Books in 2017, and has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations for volumes of his poetry and translations. The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson edited by Adam Piette and Katy Price appeared in 2007 and a new volume of critical studies edited by Tom Phillips, Peter Robinson: A Portrait of his Work, is in development at Shearsman.

Book cover image

He has also published aphorisms, short stories, literary fiction, and his six volumes of literary criticism are in print from the university presses of Oxford, Cambridge, and Liverpool. Two Rivers Press has brought out two of his collaborations with artists: English Nettles with illustrations by Sally Castle appeared in 2010, and Bonjour Mr Inshaw, with paintings by David Inshaw, is one of this year’s books. Two Rivers Press also publishes Foreigners, Drunks and Babies: Eleven Stories (2013) and his second novel, The Constitutionals (2019), whose main character takes daily walks around Reading to help recover from a cruel virus. Peter Robinson is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading and the poetry editor for Two Rivers Press.

Peter Robinson writes:

“My poetry, and much of my other writing, can be understood as an exploration of the word ‘repair’. It is a form of sheltering from experiences, and an emblem of the need to mend or make amends when selves and others have been damaged or harmed. This theme is regularly and appropriately associated with my being the witness at gunpoint to an act of sexual violence over forty years ago, which has impacted on all my work and in particular on a sequence of poems in The Other Life (1988) and the novel September in the Rain (2016).

However, it is probably unlikely that I would have responded to that experience in those ways had I not been born into the exact locations of L. S. Lowry’s paintings and brought up in a series of impoverished urban parishes in Manchester, Wigan, and Liverpool. The industrial and domestic architecture and the ravaged and re-wilding natural scenery of those places has shaped all my responses to the world, and I have taken the need to find artistic interest in such textures with me to scenery as far flung as the mountains, plains, cities and coasts of northern Italy and the volcanic landscapes of northern-eastern Japan.

My wife, Ornella Trevisan, who specialised in environmental biology at university, has undoubtedly helped enlarge the scope of that commitment to reparation and ‘repair’. If asked to give an account of my many and various writings produced and published over the best part of half a century, I would think that this dominant thought, derived from the art theories of Adrian Stokes, has been the shaping spirit that has compelled me to want to produce works that aid in the mending of ourselves, our societies, the inhabited environments on which they depend, and of the suffering world itself.”

AT SLADER’S YARD

There’s a corrugated-iron roof,
its undulations flattened
by settled years of lime-green moss;

it juts into repurposed space
where stone-wall textures are revealed,
enhanced by sparser finishes,
framed pictures hung against it:

a dusk cloud risen behind a hill,
the portrait of one tree in moonlight,
another strafing seagull …

They emphasize the edges
letting on bare sail-loft opposite:
a dried grey wood interior
where all the thrifty meanings start.

Then, me too, I’m a counter of clouds
come over the hills like this one
‘salmoning’ in a ‘deepening blue’;

they fill up turning windscreen glass
(you see I’ve put the car in too)
above West Bay’s horizon

with a borrowed sharpness, focus
from promptings given by
that pink house under its precipitous cliff.

Recounting them, you’re at least alive to
how this word-cloud builds and disperses
ideas like a Nordau’s or Lombroso’s –

and how they’re clouds themselves, these verses.

[from Bonjour Mr Inshaw, 2020]

THIS OTHER LIFETIME

Green shutters open on an early sky;
in the Casa Divina Provvidenza
even its room doors, closing, breathe a sigh.

With time, heat would release your love,
till evening’s fresher breeze,
then starlight, the companionate,

and talking on a phone, you see
her hurry towards our rendezvous
beside Mazzini’s statue in the square:

an open face, still trusting as you like,
enlivened with enthusiasm,
unfazed by time and, no mistake,

that’s the zone from where all this life came.

[First published in The London Magazine, February-March 2020]

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Peter Robinson in Conversation

Peter Robinson, the poetry editor for Two Rivers Press, talks about our list

How many poetry books do you publish each year? How many has the press published in total?

We currently aim to publish one book per quarter, using the Poetry Book Society’s activities as our temporal template. Sometimes we’ll also add one of our illustrated classic poems volumes or an anthology to the list, so I would say that we tend to produce between four and six poetry publications per year. I really couldn’t say for sure how many poetry books we have published in total; but I’ve been editing the list since September 2010, which is nearly a decade, so I’ve probably been involved in the editing of between forty and fifty books. The press was founded in 1994, so I would think we must have produced perhaps a hundred books of poetry in all.

What kinds of poetry are you interested in?

I like poetry of a great many kinds and shapes and sizes, and have been curious about how and why different forms of poems work since I was a teenager. But in all my editing activity (I first edited a poetry magazine at the age of 23), I’ve tended to keep my personal tastes under control and made judgments that are in line with my understanding of the social and cultural situation in which I am operating. As you can see from the previous answer, Two Rivers Press had been going for sixteen years when I was asked to take over running the poetry list. So I inherited a stable of poets, including Adrian Blamires, a copy of whose The Effect of Coastal Processes (2005) I found in a bookshop in Liverpool one summer when visiting from Japan. I was very impressed by the poetry, the quality of the design, and the finish of the cover. So I did know about Two Rivers Press before coming to live in Reading, and attended a reading by some of our poets in the Henley River and Rowing Museum as a way of making myself known to them when in need of some congenial company in a town new to me. When I was asked to take over its poetry list, as I say, I inherited a backlist of poets, mostly living locally, one of whom, Jane Draycott, had gone on to be published first by Oxford and then Carcanet, while another, A. F. Harrold, has gone on to become a very successful author for children and young adults. These poets had developed, largely, from a local workshop and open-mike culture, and their writing was and is broadly-speaking characterised by verbal skills, craftsmanship, and sensibilities engaged with shareable experiences, qualities that I also admire.

How do you go about selecting which books to publish?

There is a standard policy for ‘cold calling’: we ask to see a sample of six poems, and if I like them enough, we ask to see the full collection, and if that promises to fit our list (in ways that are not only aesthetic, but also involve questions about the poets’ locations and our practical ability to work with them, that’s to say her or his readiness to help sell the books), then I take the volume to a committee meeting and ask the team to have it put into our forward plan. Books are also submitted by poets we have previously published, and on one or two occasions I have offered to publish books were I knew them to exist and also knew that, for one reason or another, their poets were having difficulty with the arduous business of finding a publisher in the present environment. In other cases, I have encountered the work of new poets at readings or through contacts in the poetry world and then helped to mentor the development of a collection, sometimes over a long period of time.

Are there particular recent poetry books that you are especially proud to have published?

Penumbra is Kate Behrens’ latest collection

Among the poets that I have brought to the press during my near decade working with the team, I am particularly proud to have published, among others, first books by the late David Attwooll, Kate Behrens, Sue Leigh, James Peake, and Tom Phillips, as well as the last book published in her lifetime by Mairi MacInnes. These are poets, in their different ways, who pursue styles that retain the qualities of attentive technique that are, I believe, the basis for valuable writing, and they also stretch their language to the evoking of experiences more distinctive and challenging, more difficult easily to share, than some of the work that the press had published heretofore. I am also glad to have initiated our publishing of translations with a collection of Ruth Speirs’ versions of Rilke, to which have now been added Jane Draycott’s selection from Henri Michaux’s poetry, and Lesley Saunders’ bilingual selection from Maria Teresa Horta’s Portuguese.

Looking ahead, what is your ambition for the Two Rivers Press poetry list in the next few years?

The main thing we are hoping to do, beginning in 2021, is to enlarge the list so that we publish two poetry books per quarter. Over the last few years the profile of the press has increased and we have on occasion been reviewed in national newspapers. Enlarging the list a little, I would hope we can continue this development, and build on the geographical base of the press in the Thames valley so as to have a better relationship with the independent publishing environment in the capital, and also to find a place not only as Reading’s own publisher, but as a publisher to something more like the part of the country shown on maps in the front of Thomas Hardy’s novels. I would like to increase the range of poetry that we are known to produce, to publish some volumes of collected poems, such as David Attwooll’s, which is currently in preparation, and would also like to add further books of translated poetry to the list, including from languages beyond those of our near neighbours in western Europe.

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The inspiration behind the cover design for “The Constitutionals”

We love a beautiful book cover and work hard to make our books visually strong. Sally Castle has designed many covers for Two Rivers Press. She writes here about the inspiration for the cover artwork for The Constitutionals by Peter Robinson, which explores and celebrates the therapeutic links between reading, writing, walking and thinking through a fictional treatment of the meditative author’s convalescent wanderings around the town of Reading.

Sally writes:

The illustration started with drawings made as an immediate intuitive response while reading the manuscript. Images such as land marks: the Cemetery Junction arch and the Wycliffe Church; trees: a magnolia and a monkey puzzle outside a house in Eastern Avenue, buildings: New Town terrace houses and the gas holder, the Co-op with clock at ten past six and the green tiled Oxfam book shop. All familiar places to me: literally, in that I was born at 27 Hatherley Road, my grandparents lived at number 30, uncle and aunt lived at 68 Amity Road in New Town. Grandfather and uncle used to meet up at Cemetery junction to watch the traffic!

Several versions were developed combining the images together using watercolour and collaged with an old street map, a receipt from the Co-op (Your store Your say) and Robinson Crusoe as portrayed in an early illustrated edition. The result was also simplified down to a flat linocut print but the watercolour collage with a stormy sky was the best choice to ‘ventriloquize the grateful dead’

Thanks to Peter for asking me to do his cover and to Nadja Guggi for her support, encouragement and working magic with her technical expertise.

Sally Castle’s uncorked artwork for The Constitutionals
Linocut version of The Constitutionals cover design
Final version of The Constitutionals cover design

Sally Castle is a printmaker, illustrator and lettering artist, based in Ruscombe. You can see more of her work on her website http://www.sallycastle.co.uk

Buy a copy of The Constitutionals here.