Stride review

Rupert Loydell, who published my first full-length collection, The Horse Burning Park, back in 1994, via his Stride Books, has reviewed How I Learned to Sing on the Stride Magazine website. It's a kind and generous review, describing how this book and Paul Hawkin's Claremont Road, which Rupert also writes about, had started to rekindle a jaded interest in poetry. In a strange coincidence, I once briefly lived on the next street to Claremont Road, in E11.

Here's what Rupert had to say about the book:

Mark Robinson has ended a decade of poetic silence whilst working as a senior arts manager with a New and Selected Poems. How I Learned to Sing is aptly titled, for one of the astonishing things Robinson continually does is make music out of political and social concerns and observation. His poems tell stories, but these are stories fuelled and informed by anger and outrage at the way he and all of us are treated.

In more recent poems this is filtered through stories about his family, his fears for his children, often via more playful and gently experimental forms - lists and variant patterns. Robinson is ‘a northern poet' still, he says so in his poems; and the plain-speaking, plain-language of his early work has (thankfully) never gone away. Robinson has no time for daft ideas or political shenanigans, wants to cut through the crap and make it right; ask questions and get direct answers.

This isn't, however, political poetry that rants and screams: there's little sloganeering and no platitudes here. Robinson's politics is personal: in his world art and writing count, politics is personal and affects the real families, communities and society he is part of. It is from this that he makes his poems and tells his stories, makes comments and asks questions.

Here are two poets who have learned to sing down-to-earth songs, who know that 'Ideas should not be mistaken for facts' (Robinson) but know ideas come out of facts, make facts and inform facts. Fact: this is hard-won, hard-working poetry, that's reminded me how good words on the page can be.