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Robin Robertson’s fourth collection is an intense, moving, bleakly lyrical, and at times shocking book. These poems are written with the authority of classical myth, yet sound utterly contemporary. The poet’s gaze—whether on the natural world or the details of his own life— is unflinching and clear, its utter seriousness leavened by a wry, dry, and disarming humor.

Alongside fine translations from Neruda and Montale and dynamic retellings of stories from Ovid, the poems here pitch the power and wonder of nature against the frailty and failure of the human. This is a book of considerable grandeur and sweep that confirms Robertson as one of the most arresting and powerful poets at work today.

Book review: ‘The Wrecking Light’ by Robin Robertson

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – October 23, 2011 (Excerpt)

Robin Robertson is caught between worlds — between the contemporary London in which he lives and an epic past evoked by longboats and bonfires and where myths, not science, explain the workings of the world. His 2006 collection “Swithering” actively moved between both just as that interesting word — a Scottish one referring not only to agitation but also to vacillation and movement — clearly announced on the book’s cover.

And in his new collection, “The Wrecking Light” (Mariner Books: 97 pp., $13.95 paper), that tendency to swither remains as the poet moves between homages to Ovid, Neruda, Baudelaire and other great figures of the past and moody glimpses of himself and the modern world (“How long ago,” he asks in “Easter, Liguria,” “did I notice that the light was wrong,/ that something inside me was broken?”)

One of the collection’s centerpieces is “Leaving St. Kilda,” an extraordinary poem, written in that full-blown rhetoric of epic adventure that you might find in a translation of “The Odyssey” or “The Iliad” about a pitiful little island beyond the Outer Hebrides — a place so tiny it barely merits a mark on most atlases of the world. Small as it is, however, Robertson invests its entire landscape, the place names and landmark names, with a magic that’s clearly in the spirit of Tolkien (or, for that matter, George R.R. Martin). [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.