The final poet of the afternoon, Mark Robinson, read from his collection How I Learned to Sing. It is a collection about the “cultural and industrial transformation of the North of England” and this therefore makes Robinson the most obviously “regional” of all three poets. Never one to avoid a good pun, Robinson created his own version of the Bohemian Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies,but instead colloquially entitled them The Dunno Elegies. The poem that would naturally lend itself best to a Durham Book Festival reading is a musing on the historic city itself, and Robinson successfully fused Durham’s rich history with his own poetic style. He presented a vivid picture of the “earth-bound angels” that “throng the bridges” and the all-too-familiar notion of being given “a lecture in rhetoric.”
As well as these topographical works, what makes Robinson’s writing so unexpectedly brilliant is his ability to turn from what one would consider conventional aestheticism but to still create something ultimately beautiful. In How I Learned to Sing, the audience are presented with the striking image of “the snag of mishaps” that has “shaped mum’s face into a taut parody of itself.” Yet, as Robinson read aloud, you could understand how his writing is not intended for the academics; instead he is writing for, not, as his poem exclaims, the “real birds” with “real blood”, but the “real people” with “real heritage.”
