Michael Blackburn has written a very interesting, and generous, review of How I Learned to Sing in Poetry Salzburg #25. It's part of a long essay so I've not copied it all out. There are a few choice paragraphs below, use technology to read the images if you want to see the full thing.
I like the idea of being part of 'the airbrushed Great Poetry Surge' but should point out I presume Michael means airbrushed out… I don't think we used Photoshop to look thinner. (Might be a good idea now, though…)
"With his influential magazine, Scratch, as
well as his own poems, Mark Robinson was one of the original participants of
the airbrushed Great Poetry Surge of the 1980s and 1990s (forget about the ‘New
Generation’ stuff – that was the metropolitan establishment waking up to what
they’d failed to see and which they’d played no part in producing). When he
progressed from vegetarian chef to arts administrator, turning from
metaphorical poacher to gamekeeper, he took a decade-long self-imposed
sabbatical from publishing his work. For the poetry world this was a loss, but
with this excellent collection from Smokestack Books we can catch up with what
we missed.
‘The world is a place that has changed and
I need your help’ the poet says in one of his earliest pieces, and it could be
taken a primary motif of all of his work. Robinson has become a chronicler not
just of his personal life – marriage, children, getting older – but also of the
society in which he lives.
….
For me, the great strength of his work is
the straight-forward human warmth it demonstrates… If you ant to get the best
of Robinson, I do not think you can do better than ‘My Love’, which is one of
the finest contemporary love poems I have read, and exactly as Milton said
poetry should be, simple, sensuous and passionate – and economically short,
deploying clear images and a sure sense of rhythm and pace: ‘Such a long time
ago now, and nothing to be done,/ which is why I bring you fruit and drink and
hope.’
As Pound wrote in Canto 81, ‘What thou
lovest well remains, / the rest is dross’; and with this poet’s talent and our
luck what remains is a poem like that.’ "
