The Wrecking Light

Uncompromising concentration distinguishes all the poems in this fourth collection. Do not look to them for comfort, but for an austere, vigorous beauty; the language is both lyrical and taut as a bow string.

There is an acuity of loss in Robin Robertson’s work, both in the clarity in which it is expressed and in the sharp relief it throws on other things

Robertson doesn’t give ground to the illusory comfort of the ordinary, and he has a sardonic humour of his own . . . poetry matters a good deal, though it has little obvious comfort to offer, just the compelling evidence of its own serious attention and its shaping impulse, which ought to be enough.