Published 2027. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20 ISBN 9781837380664 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Peter Robinson’s new collection, Blind Summits
, takes its title from exclamatory signs on rising roads where the view beyond hill crests may present unexpected challenges to a driver. These poems, from the years around the turn of his eighth decade, negotiate a way through such varied experiences as our emergence from the global pandemic and the return of war to mainland Europe. They re-engage with the relation of immediate perception to the world and its underlying structures, encounter in the title sequence interrelations of landscape, art, and the politics of ecosystem survival, and, in the book’s summative section, explore a seaside town guided by a rereading of John Cowper Powys’s Weymouth Sands
, its surroundings and associations.
Continuing to employ what Roy Fisher called ‘a listening device, alert for the moments when the tectonic plates of mental experience slide quietly one beneath another’ and Adam Piette has described as ‘an astonishingly fine-tuned gauge for recording the pressures and processes that generate lived occasions’, these latest poems are characteristically responsive to their variously unexpected turns of events. Called ‘the finest poet of his generation’ ( PN Review
) and ‘a major English poet’ ( Poetry Review
), with Blind Summits
Peter Robinson invites new and returning readers to consider those unforeseen evaluations.
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