A hónap verse 2012. február - Robin Robertson The Wreckling Light című kötetének versei

Robertson, a native of northeastern Scotland, has said "I grew up with a very strong sense of place, in a landscape that seemed freighted with significance, mystery and power. Everything since has seemed a displacement, a deracination."
(Adam Newey, The Guardian)
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.
In his collection, "The Wrecking Light" 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.
There's a drama and majesty here that also teaches us a lesson: That a writer, a poet especially, has the power to make an act of recovery. In "Leaving St. Kilda" Robertson recalls all those unique, old names (and who, by the way, first named them?) before they're lost — before the clouds stream over them, as they do over Mullach Mòr, and they're forgotten. Elsewhere in this somber, beautiful collection, Robertson does the same with smaller, fleeting moments of insight as his speakers confront the passing of time — how, for instance, in "Landfall," the "crates that once held herring,/ freshly dead, now hold distance, nothing but the names/ of the places I came from, years ago." (Nick Owchar)