Everything's sloping off anywhere else –
like that faulty landscape
with a crack in it, a gap
here where whatever the false
perspectives carrying us away
they also serve
to bring back, just once in a while, a love
along with the whole cabaret
of mental furniture, double acts, turns,
rare views from the provinces...
and love, she makes her entrances,
exits under my defences
where everything sloping off returns.

Where larger items in the distance
grow to insignificance
as they go near, I'm done
explaining to her mother –
nothing untoward between us, no one
proved wrong or right, but rather
spaces weakening the ties
and all of it like a sleight-of-mind
deceiving me, while eyes
follow a stream to the hill's brow,
or I'm leaning from a window
to touch the paths that wind
there, there which used to be where here is now.

 

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Peter Robinson teaches at Sendai University in Japan. His recent Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2003) is a major retrospective of his work and includes some early material that is hard to find. In the late 1970s he edited the Cambridge magazine Perfect Bound, which was recently the subject of a retrospective study on the jacket magazine website. He has also translated the work of Vittorio Sereni, and written works of literary criticism. He has edited critical volumes on Roy Fisher, Adrian Stokes and Geoffrey Hill, among others.

Copyright © Peter Robinson, 2003