Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems - Tapa dura

Read it, give it, read it aloud, give it to poetry agnostics and watch them shiver, touched by the poet's tinsel, his understanding of this light and that darkness -- Candia McWilliam, Books of the Year 2014 * Sunday Herald * A wonderfully generous selected poems. Great precision of language, limpid observation and a rare ability to make the narrative of the poems resonate evocatively. A ripple-effect that is remarkably profound -- William Boyd, Best Books of 2014 * Guardian * Surely the year's poetry event. This is wonderful verse: muscular, astringent, tender and deeply felt -- John Banville, Best Books of 2014 * Guardian * Robin Robertson's bracing book offers a host of pleasures: rich and briny atmospheres, the burr and bristle of a fine ear, an eye restless for exact and searing detail. But the greatest of these is watching a writer come into his own, in poems increasingly compelling and large in their embrace, their dark and lustrous landscapes fully inhabited, fully haunted -- Mark Doty Robin Robertson is one of the finest contemporary poets, as Sailing the Forest amply shows. His is a wonderful hard clear music, and the muscularity and toughness of his verse is everywhere counterpointed by a deep-lying tenderness -- John Banville

Sailing the Forest, Robin Robertson's Selected Poems, is the definitive guide to one of the most important poetic voices to have emerged from the UK in the last twenty-five years. Robertson's lyrical, brooding, dark and often ravishingly beautiful verse has seen him win almost every major poetry award; readers on both sides of the Atlantic have delighted in his preternaturally accurate ear and eye, and his utterly distinctive way with everything from the love poem to the macabre narrative. This book is both an ideal introduction to a necessary poet, and a fine summary of the great range and depth of Robertson's work to date.