Robin Robertson is from the north-east coast of Scotland. His first book, A Painted Field, won the 1997 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. His poetry appears regularly in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Times Literary Supplement, and he is represented in a number of anthologies, including New British Poetry (Paterson & Simic), The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (Crawford & Imlah), and Penguin Modern Poets 13 (with Michael Hofmann & Michael Longley).

His second collection, Slow Air, was published by Picador in February 2002. The following year he edited Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (Fourth Estate). In 2004 he was chosen as one of the twenty Next Generation Poets, and he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Related links

› Robin Robertson featured in the Next Generation promotion

› Simon Armitage introduces Next Generation poets in The Guardian

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Books I love

An old favourite
'Basil Bunting, early Geoffrey Hill, David Jones, Robert Lowell, W.B. Yeats.'

A new favourite
'Will Oldham, Alasdair Roberts, Jim White.'

Robin Robertson, 2004

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Featured poem

from Dumb Show, With Candles

Now the night has fallen, Edinburgh comes alight
as if each building’s shell
has a fire inside that burned. The follies
– lit exhibits – stand here on the hill
in their white stone; the Castle glows.
And the streets are bright blurs of sodium
and pearl: the drawn tracery of headlamps
smeared in long exposure. For miles west
the city stretches,
laid with vapour trails and ghosts.

To the east, the folding sea has drowned
the girning of the gulls. A lighthouse
perforates the night: a slow cigarette.
Then there is no more light,
and no more breath or sound.

Robin Robertson © 1997
from A Painted Field (Picador 1997)

This extract comes from a sequence called Camera Obscura, and combines contemporary Edinburgh with the life of the pioneering photographer David Octavius Hill.