Robin has had two collections of poetry published, “After The Wound” (2003) and “Never Quite Prepared For Light” (2004) both by Arrowhead Press. Early next year Cinnamon Press will publish “On The Brink”.
Robin started writing in his mid-fifties after a long mental illness which appeared to settle that seemed to ‘unfreeze’ the part of his mind inclined to poetry. Robin is immensely influenced by the countryside of the Isle of Wight.
FRIDAY NIGHT WITH FAUSTUS
bright dreams after dark deals
he makes a ruckus in a pub
bullets fire and fuse him
he fists his brain in black delight
from his wound he pulls
a string of diamonds
snorts lines of amethysts
before a mirror in the Gents urinal
contrives an angle that will let him view
a passage way into his temples
and crouched like Alice wanders tunnels
past many Knaves and walruses
through nauseous doors
this is what he bought and bargained for
his pleasure comes in perverse forms
as piper he commands the company
to dance punk symphonies
jar harmonies across the spheres
in unsuspected universes
rap poems out in colours
plays with living toys
sews Rothko wounds
in plush and felt
who would not trade souls
for prizes such as these
what’s a soul worth weighed against
such atavistic wilderness
FROST AT NEWTOWN
Salt marsh midwinter
calls of curlew shelduck lapwing
split ice-bound air
wind smothered by high pressure
moon-dragged tide
huddles up with gathered waters
south of the wood
sun weak and low
it cannot clear the trees
each finger of the creek
is chapped with frost
spars of it
lie thick as straw
I am alone
as meant to be
still as death
yet never more alive.
I KNEW BARTOK
You don’t believe me, jibe I am too young?
Our lives overlapped by three full years,
my first, his last, even though I never was
in Hungary, nor exile in the USA
(war and youth is my defence).
But I heard muted sounds of wilderness,
creaks, cries in midnight woods, with him
whose hearing was phenomenal – bat cries,
owl shrieks, grubs burrowing in logs.
Once I dreamt the two of us set sail in boats
gunnel-full of those on vague but potent pilgrimage
to seek the seals. He longed to hear the songs ascribed
to silkies, blocked off by limits of the human ear.
Despite the whirr and click of cameras, and though
the seals were silent, I think he sensed their song
and I was feared, as it is sometimes said,
they might assume a human form, lure him
to the sandbanks of the Wash or far-flung skerries
in the wild north-west – but he was more of land
than sea and maybe sounds that hug the ocean’s heave
are waves on different frequencies than those he heard.
I knew him, know him still, despite his death in exile;
there is no bar to knowing artists such as he. That harsh
music flows to me from him, preserver of the sounds
his century killed, peasant songs and dances,
Magyar, Bulgar, Roma, resurrected from the death
and silence of the camps so I, and you
if you should take to them, may sing them still.
When I walk lanes at dusk, gaze at stars
above the woods and sea, I feel him strong
as running waters. Should you doubt our friendship,
I say hear me and stutter out a phrase so feebly
you turn away. His rhythms, irrepressible as springs,
are plasma in me, inexhaustible despite the great
felled forests which birthed and sheltered them,
till Europe fell and died.
