Price: $22.95
(as of Aug 10, 2025 04:52:22 UTC – Details)
Return to Sendai: New & Selected Poems 1973–2024 showcases a retrospective of the British poet Peter Robinson’s work written over a half century. Illustrating the full range of his gifts, these chosen poems and ones collected for the first time are characteristically responsive both to fresh encounters and evocative homecomings. The book explores themes related to the United States and elsewhere, recalls and revisits his years in Japan, reports on his country’s newly fraught relations with the continent to which it belongs, evokes familial locations in an Italy to which he has repeatedly returned, and, for its final section, recovers attachments to people and places from both home and familiar landscapes. Described as “the finest poet of his generation” (PN Review) and “a major English poet” (Poetry Review), these new and selected poems introduce American readers to some of the reasons why.
“‘We’ve been exiled from our exile.’ For half a century, from ‘Afterward,’ his spare and moving 1973 elegy for Ezra Pound, to his 2022 homage to his aged mother, who cannot bear to hear the news of yet another war, Peter Robinson has been enchanting us with his quietly meditative poems—poems that prefer to ‘leave the threads dangling’ rather than to provide any sort of closure. It is the openness of Robinson’s lyric, its recognition that even at home, the poet must regard his culture from the position of exile, that make his evocative memory poems so special. The ‘sea of yellow gingko leaves’ of ‘Kyoto Protocols’ gives way, imperceptibly, to a Jasper Johnian ‘white, wire coat hanger / dangling from one low branch of the tree.’”
—Marjorie Perloff
“The poems exploit a paradox: the sense of meticulously careful writing which places the poet in complete control, reinforced by his access to formalities of meter and rhyme when he needs them, work to undermine his self-security, his sense of standing firmly on the ground.” —Peter Riley
“Reading Peter Robinson you are reminded—rare these days—of the efficacy of poetry, its ability to hold any occasion in view, clearly but with a sense always of its weight and consequence, sometimes personal, sometimes social, or political. Many of these poems travel—to Europe, Asia, and America—a poetry of places, then, always weaving image together with the moment’s response. Robinson is Britain’s major poet. This new and selected Return to Sendai should make a similar place for him in America.” —Michael Anania
Publisher : MadHat Press
Publication date : April 4, 2025
Language : English
Print length : 244 pages
ISBN-10 : 1952335922
ISBN-13 : 978-1952335921
Item Weight : 13.4 ounces
Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.61 x 8.5 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #2,093,618 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #879 in Poetry About Places (Books) #4,034 in European Poetry (Books) #7,064 in American Poetry (Books)
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