Poetry review – RETURN TO SENDAI
Nick Cooke takes an in-depth look at a major compilation of work by Peter Robinson
Return to Sendai:
New & Selected Poems 1973-2024
Peter Robinson
MadHat Press
ISBN 978-1-952335-92-1
pp 217 $22.95
Published by the Massachusetts-based MadHat Press, this 200-page retrospective of Peter Robinson’s poetry is specifically aimed at introducing American readers to the work of one of Britain’s most distinguished contemporary literary figures, who was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953.
Following a first section, Westwood Dusk, that brings together poems directly relating to the United States, Approaches to Distance and Return to Sendai deal primarily with Robinson’s experience of and response to Japan, embracing his revisiting of that country in 2017, on a four-month fellowship, having earlier lived and worked there for many years. Ravishing Europa views the continent from a political-historical angle, while Consorts of Phantasms centres more specifically on Italy, where the poet has also spent considerable time, with his second wife and their two daughters. The book concludes with Manifestos for a Lost Cause, which comprises some earlier work, a sequence from the Covid years and some recent uncollected poems.
One of the previously unpublished poems, written at aged 20, is ‘Afterward’, dedicated to Ezra Pound, a sparse but moving elegy which serves as a form of blueprint for aspects of the more mature poet’s moral and intellectual stance, including his principled and often courageous refusal to accept so-called truths at face value. The opening phrase ‘Marooned in self’ implies both self-regard, to the point of solipsism, and a profound and unavoidable loneliness, thus inviting both repulsion and pity. The conclusion, with its characteristic modifiers ‘would’ and ‘perhaps’, generously seeks to adjust the now widespread negative viewpoint of the Fascist-leaning Pound, by begging leave (though the begging retains its dignity even as it lays bare its chest) to offer a dissenting voice:
I would, in emulation,
perhaps see
his confessions of error
as a gesture to humility.
How tellingly precise is the choice of preposition in the final line: where anyone would expect ‘of’, ‘to’ magnifies the importance of remaining humble, to the point where we would not have baulked at ‘humility’ being capitalised.
Another early poem, ‘Worlds Apart’, deals with different viewpoints in another context. It dramatises the story of Robinson’s grandfather, who emigrates from Manchester to the New World, but blighted by ill health, ends up returning to his homeland. This man has brought back the American dream with him, but the locals see his Tory-voting, man-of-property act as pompous and absurd. However, instead of sharing the mockery expressed by those observing him, the poet compassionately salvages the now elderly man’s self-worth, through acknowledgement of his toil, practical aptitude and inner complexity:
Sweat stands out on that wrinkled pate.
Tying runner beans to poles
the eye’s aim
and his hands
co-ordinate
and the act appeases
tumult, voices in the head.
A much more recent offering displays a similarly balanced, open-minded approach, in this case regarding the 2024 American Presidential election. ‘I’ll be rethinking where truth lies / for the faces running marathons or for the President’, Robinson zeugmatically announces in ‘Suite Americana’, with ‘truth lies’ both a provocative and deliberately clumsy oxymoron whose origins are later revealed:
we see Where Truth Lies
on a flickering Times Square ad in daylight
as, truth is, whatever you say,
it’s contradicted by some other where.
Certainty of opinion may prove challenging, but exactitude of language is clearly vital to the painstakingly punctilious poet, critic and translator that Robinson has proved himself over more than half a century of dedication. In ‘Unfaithful Translations’, he addresses one of his mentors, the by-now-deceased Italian poet, Vittorio Sereni, much of whose work he has translated, on the issue of apparently translatable lexemes in English and Italian which are not actually equivalent, causing ‘well-meant misunderstandings’ between the two men:
Late perhaps, perhaps distorted, but your words
came offering in trust
– substance, I’m to realise,
a counterbalance to perpetually lost
body, voice, touch, absorbed eyes
as though inviting me toward
myself, a life, the knowledge you have left us.
The final phrase offers syntactical alternatives, in a way characteristic of Robinson – Sereni has both departed this life and bequeathed valuable knowledge. ‘As though’ suggests that Sereni did not actually invite him in so many words, but the earned-for contact of souls did occur, and Robinson definitely took up that invitation.
His journey, both introspective and outwardly-facing, has entailed moments where a deep-rooted sense of justice has made him less equivocal than at other times. ‘Variations on a Theme’, for instance, explores and by inference repudiates monoculturalism in Italy, in the shadow of the 2016 Brexit vote, with the modern-day country defined not just by its visual beauty (‘at the seaside / or high on a mountain’) but the presence of ‘extracomunitari (such as we’d soon be)’, and continental marginalisation pictured in individual, deeply human – and pointedly female – terms: ‘Africa was on the pavement / shouldering her baby / with a bright-print swatch of cloth, / Africa and Asia too / queuing for nationality’.
Several poems mark his sometimes ambivalent experience of Japanese culture, such as ‘Tokyo in Glimpses’, where he shares happy reminiscences of parks and lakes with his daughter, but also sees himself as a ‘gray ghost /come back to haunt Japan’, and ‘Lost Objects’, which flags up the tradition of people considerately placing lost property they happen upon in a visible nearby place – a custom that the poet weaves into a mini-disquisition around himself and others getting lost psychologically, recalling his comment in an interview that throughout his peripatetic life he’s had ‘a sense of displacement practically all the time’. But as with Italy, nostalgia does not preclude recognition of darker episodes in a nation’s history, and ‘Aftershocks’ summarily snuffs out any hint of sentimentality:
I heard survival’s celebration
tormenting those with a relation
or two, with whole families
in just twenty seconds gone.
Robinson’s unostentatious technique is epitomised by the rapid movement from ‘a’ to ‘two’ to ‘whole families’ that discreetly enacts the devastating speed of the earthquake at Kobe (though the wording is sufficiently generic for it to encompass an event like Hiroshima).
Other poems in the more directly political category, such as ‘Balkan Trilogy’ and ‘Out of Solidarity’, touch respectively on Robinson’s shocked response to the Brexit referendum result (fearing a ‘Balkanisation’ of the UK), and the current war in Ukraine. At the end of ‘The Further Losses’, a trenchant note marks Robinson’s comment on politicians, who ‘on their holidays / are looking to the conference season / where they’ll be yet more damage to get done’, with the use of the causative foreshadowing a potential denial of personal responsibility.
Only very occasionally does the poet allow overt, righteous anger to seep into his tone. Although he has opted to omit his widely-admired early poems dealing with the gunpoint rape of his then girlfriend (later his first wife) in Italy in 1975, the topic surfaces in ‘Ravishing Europa’, as one might expect from the laceratingly punning title. He recollects ‘lying with the victim / of a far-off rape, a / ravishing, likes the ones depicted / in occidental summer twilight / on its sunset lands’. Again, beautiful scenery is counterpointed with the ugly reality of predation, while in the context of mendacity ‘lying’ intimates a reluctance or inability to confront the ghastly truth of the lasting harm inflicted by such violence. In ‘Retrieved Attachments’, the section ‘You Too’ (as opposed to #MeToo) raises the issue of whether forgiveness can be considered for the arguably unforgiveable, when some are prepared to view it in terms of human error:
now let your violated body speak –
which, wanting, so unsettled me,
whilst tolerance of his mistake
also lay behind your look.
The concept of apology can itself be problematic, as in ‘After Bansui’, where, due to regrettably widespread denialism, events such as the Holocaust continue to elude full closure: ‘and though some still insist it never was, / others have been ready to apologize at last / for the mounds of unearthed skulls, the burden / of documents in archives, stored or lost’. With ‘apologize’ does Robinson mean ‘say sorry’ or the antithetical ‘defend’? And just how sardonic are those modifiers ‘ready to’ and ‘at last’?
Sometimes the burden of loss, both personal and universal, takes a toll that possibly only art, rather than life, can assuage. The title poem of Consorts of Phantasms, to my mind one of the finest in the collection, contemplates the inability to hold on to somebody one loves, with a backdrop (Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’ comes to mind) redolent of Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ and its intimations of both transience and imminent mournfulness:
Under laden apple and plum trees, these faces
are softened, flecked, reanimated
in changing light near summer’s end; …
Robinson sits at a telephone, ‘aware, at least aware / of lives passing in the leaves’ extremities’, but the phone call with the object of his love, far from symbolising communication, only serves to emphasise the painful separation, as he achingly misses ‘that fullness present to me alone / here – because she’s what I cannot keep’. Robinson’s tone becomes openly elegiac, even untypically lofty, as his belief in the transformative power of sincere emotion leads him to commemorate – if not quite celebrate – ‘a final goodness which still lives / through me now, and in this life forever’.
The poem’s ending highlights the ideal of poetic permanence (preferably immortality), in a way that applies to so much of this collection. Not all commitments we would like to make in life can be fulfilled, but, as Robinson recently stated, in a private communication, ‘you make them in poetry, where, if you believe in the efficacy of art as I do then the commitment is being made and I’ll stand by it “in this life forever”, where the phrase “this life” is ambiguous between “the life of art and poetry” and “the life of the person referenced by the first-person pronoun”.’ This still under-appreciated yet major figure in contemporary British poetry has certainly stood by his commitments, and this book – a true work of art – bears witness to the efficacy in which he has such faith.
His art pays frequent homage to other poets. Keats himself flickers in and out of several later poems, including ‘On the Mobile,’ in which an echo from the fairy-lands allusion of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ offsets the bathos of modern Americanised, Mickey-Mouse sterility: ‘I’m back to some Luna Park or Disneyland forlorn’. In ‘Open Account’, a Japanese nightingale, like its Hampstead equivalent ‘Not born for death’, is humorously compared to Robinson’s Sumitomo bank account, still operational when he returns years after living there. Other poets are invoked, from Wyatt through Matthew Arnold to T. S. Eliot, with Shakespeare a constant background figure. ‘One Fine Day’ pays tribute to Robinson’s nonagenarian mother, and remarks that ‘the heart / is filled with forgotten, if ever known, / pasts come back to tell you who / or how you used to be…’, with the final lines summoning MacNeice’s ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’: ‘grateful as you are, you say, / for sunlight and a breeze’.
Are we ‘dying, Egypt, dying’, to pick up that memorable phrase from MacNeice, himself of course referencing Shakespeare’s Mark Antony? Perhaps not altogether, according to the general tenor of this book’s climactic sequence, ‘Ligurian Diary’, where Valéry’s dictum that ‘Il faut tenter de vivre’ finds, if not exactly a translation, then a respectful gloss. Backgrounded by a wedding in 2023, which highlights the two main areas of Robinson’s own international experience, at the marriage of a bride with Japanese and Italian parentage, the poem conjures ‘us guests / from all the compass points’ in ‘gardens where rain-laden breeze / scatters rose petals and stirs / a swapping of far-flung memories…’ Eliot’s ‘Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers’ perhaps pervades Robinson’s valedictory toast not just to the newly married couple, but to the whole assembled party, and the wider world it represents:
Then let the wind lift, white sails at distance,
look, filled full while we each try
to live and be fulfilled…
Feb 26 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Peter Robinson
Poetry review – RETURN TO SENDAI
Nick Cooke takes an in-depth look at a major compilation of work by Peter Robinson
Return to Sendai:
New & Selected Poems 1973-2024
Peter Robinson
MadHat Press
ISBN 978-1-952335-92-1
pp 217 $22.95
Published by the Massachusetts-based MadHat Press, this 200-page retrospective of Peter Robinson’s poetry is specifically aimed at introducing American readers to the work of one of Britain’s most distinguished contemporary literary figures, who was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953.
Following a first section, Westwood Dusk, that brings together poems directly relating to the United States, Approaches to Distance and Return to Sendai deal primarily with Robinson’s experience of and response to Japan, embracing his revisiting of that country in 2017, on a four-month fellowship, having earlier lived and worked there for many years. Ravishing Europa views the continent from a political-historical angle, while Consorts of Phantasms centres more specifically on Italy, where the poet has also spent considerable time, with his second wife and their two daughters. The book concludes with Manifestos for a Lost Cause, which comprises some earlier work, a sequence from the Covid years and some recent uncollected poems.
One of the previously unpublished poems, written at aged 20, is ‘Afterward’, dedicated to Ezra Pound, a sparse but moving elegy which serves as a form of blueprint for aspects of the more mature poet’s moral and intellectual stance, including his principled and often courageous refusal to accept so-called truths at face value. The opening phrase ‘Marooned in self’ implies both self-regard, to the point of solipsism, and a profound and unavoidable loneliness, thus inviting both repulsion and pity. The conclusion, with its characteristic modifiers ‘would’ and ‘perhaps’, generously seeks to adjust the now widespread negative viewpoint of the Fascist-leaning Pound, by begging leave (though the begging retains its dignity even as it lays bare its chest) to offer a dissenting voice:
I would, in emulation,
perhaps see
his confessions of error
as a gesture to humility.
How tellingly precise is the choice of preposition in the final line: where anyone would expect ‘of’, ‘to’ magnifies the importance of remaining humble, to the point where we would not have baulked at ‘humility’ being capitalised.
Another early poem, ‘Worlds Apart’, deals with different viewpoints in another context. It dramatises the story of Robinson’s grandfather, who emigrates from Manchester to the New World, but blighted by ill health, ends up returning to his homeland. This man has brought back the American dream with him, but the locals see his Tory-voting, man-of-property act as pompous and absurd. However, instead of sharing the mockery expressed by those observing him, the poet compassionately salvages the now elderly man’s self-worth, through acknowledgement of his toil, practical aptitude and inner complexity:
Sweat stands out on that wrinkled pate.
Tying runner beans to poles
the eye’s aim
and his hands
co-ordinate
and the act appeases
tumult, voices in the head.
A much more recent offering displays a similarly balanced, open-minded approach, in this case regarding the 2024 American Presidential election. ‘I’ll be rethinking where truth lies / for the faces running marathons or for the President’, Robinson zeugmatically announces in ‘Suite Americana’, with ‘truth lies’ both a provocative and deliberately clumsy oxymoron whose origins are later revealed:
we see Where Truth Lies
on a flickering Times Square ad in daylight
as, truth is, whatever you say,
it’s contradicted by some other where.
Certainty of opinion may prove challenging, but exactitude of language is clearly vital to the painstakingly punctilious poet, critic and translator that Robinson has proved himself over more than half a century of dedication. In ‘Unfaithful Translations’, he addresses one of his mentors, the by-now-deceased Italian poet, Vittorio Sereni, much of whose work he has translated, on the issue of apparently translatable lexemes in English and Italian which are not actually equivalent, causing ‘well-meant misunderstandings’ between the two men:
Late perhaps, perhaps distorted, but your words
came offering in trust
– substance, I’m to realise,
a counterbalance to perpetually lost
body, voice, touch, absorbed eyes
as though inviting me toward
myself, a life, the knowledge you have left us.
The final phrase offers syntactical alternatives, in a way characteristic of Robinson – Sereni has both departed this life and bequeathed valuable knowledge. ‘As though’ suggests that Sereni did not actually invite him in so many words, but the earned-for contact of souls did occur, and Robinson definitely took up that invitation.
His journey, both introspective and outwardly-facing, has entailed moments where a deep-rooted sense of justice has made him less equivocal than at other times. ‘Variations on a Theme’, for instance, explores and by inference repudiates monoculturalism in Italy, in the shadow of the 2016 Brexit vote, with the modern-day country defined not just by its visual beauty (‘at the seaside / or high on a mountain’) but the presence of ‘extracomunitari (such as we’d soon be)’, and continental marginalisation pictured in individual, deeply human – and pointedly female – terms: ‘Africa was on the pavement / shouldering her baby / with a bright-print swatch of cloth, / Africa and Asia too / queuing for nationality’.
Several poems mark his sometimes ambivalent experience of Japanese culture, such as ‘Tokyo in Glimpses’, where he shares happy reminiscences of parks and lakes with his daughter, but also sees himself as a ‘gray ghost /come back to haunt Japan’, and ‘Lost Objects’, which flags up the tradition of people considerately placing lost property they happen upon in a visible nearby place – a custom that the poet weaves into a mini-disquisition around himself and others getting lost psychologically, recalling his comment in an interview that throughout his peripatetic life he’s had ‘a sense of displacement practically all the time’. But as with Italy, nostalgia does not preclude recognition of darker episodes in a nation’s history, and ‘Aftershocks’ summarily snuffs out any hint of sentimentality:
I heard survival’s celebration
tormenting those with a relation
or two, with whole families
in just twenty seconds gone.
Robinson’s unostentatious technique is epitomised by the rapid movement from ‘a’ to ‘two’ to ‘whole families’ that discreetly enacts the devastating speed of the earthquake at Kobe (though the wording is sufficiently generic for it to encompass an event like Hiroshima).
Other poems in the more directly political category, such as ‘Balkan Trilogy’ and ‘Out of Solidarity’, touch respectively on Robinson’s shocked response to the Brexit referendum result (fearing a ‘Balkanisation’ of the UK), and the current war in Ukraine. At the end of ‘The Further Losses’, a trenchant note marks Robinson’s comment on politicians, who ‘on their holidays / are looking to the conference season / where they’ll be yet more damage to get done’, with the use of the causative foreshadowing a potential denial of personal responsibility.
Only very occasionally does the poet allow overt, righteous anger to seep into his tone. Although he has opted to omit his widely-admired early poems dealing with the gunpoint rape of his then girlfriend (later his first wife) in Italy in 1975, the topic surfaces in ‘Ravishing Europa’, as one might expect from the laceratingly punning title. He recollects ‘lying with the victim / of a far-off rape, a / ravishing, likes the ones depicted / in occidental summer twilight / on its sunset lands’. Again, beautiful scenery is counterpointed with the ugly reality of predation, while in the context of mendacity ‘lying’ intimates a reluctance or inability to confront the ghastly truth of the lasting harm inflicted by such violence. In ‘Retrieved Attachments’, the section ‘You Too’ (as opposed to #MeToo) raises the issue of whether forgiveness can be considered for the arguably unforgiveable, when some are prepared to view it in terms of human error:
now let your violated body speak –
which, wanting, so unsettled me,
whilst tolerance of his mistake
also lay behind your look.
The concept of apology can itself be problematic, as in ‘After Bansui’, where, due to regrettably widespread denialism, events such as the Holocaust continue to elude full closure: ‘and though some still insist it never was, / others have been ready to apologize at last / for the mounds of unearthed skulls, the burden / of documents in archives, stored or lost’. With ‘apologize’ does Robinson mean ‘say sorry’ or the antithetical ‘defend’? And just how sardonic are those modifiers ‘ready to’ and ‘at last’?
Sometimes the burden of loss, both personal and universal, takes a toll that possibly only art, rather than life, can assuage. The title poem of Consorts of Phantasms, to my mind one of the finest in the collection, contemplates the inability to hold on to somebody one loves, with a backdrop (Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’ comes to mind) redolent of Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ and its intimations of both transience and imminent mournfulness:
Under laden apple and plum trees, these faces
are softened, flecked, reanimated
in changing light near summer’s end; …
Robinson sits at a telephone, ‘aware, at least aware / of lives passing in the leaves’ extremities’, but the phone call with the object of his love, far from symbolising communication, only serves to emphasise the painful separation, as he achingly misses ‘that fullness present to me alone / here – because she’s what I cannot keep’. Robinson’s tone becomes openly elegiac, even untypically lofty, as his belief in the transformative power of sincere emotion leads him to commemorate – if not quite celebrate – ‘a final goodness which still lives / through me now, and in this life forever’.
The poem’s ending highlights the ideal of poetic permanence (preferably immortality), in a way that applies to so much of this collection. Not all commitments we would like to make in life can be fulfilled, but, as Robinson recently stated, in a private communication, ‘you make them in poetry, where, if you believe in the efficacy of art as I do then the commitment is being made and I’ll stand by it “in this life forever”, where the phrase “this life” is ambiguous between “the life of art and poetry” and “the life of the person referenced by the first-person pronoun”.’ This still under-appreciated yet major figure in contemporary British poetry has certainly stood by his commitments, and this book – a true work of art – bears witness to the efficacy in which he has such faith.
His art pays frequent homage to other poets. Keats himself flickers in and out of several later poems, including ‘On the Mobile,’ in which an echo from the fairy-lands allusion of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ offsets the bathos of modern Americanised, Mickey-Mouse sterility: ‘I’m back to some Luna Park or Disneyland forlorn’. In ‘Open Account’, a Japanese nightingale, like its Hampstead equivalent ‘Not born for death’, is humorously compared to Robinson’s Sumitomo bank account, still operational when he returns years after living there. Other poets are invoked, from Wyatt through Matthew Arnold to T. S. Eliot, with Shakespeare a constant background figure. ‘One Fine Day’ pays tribute to Robinson’s nonagenarian mother, and remarks that ‘the heart / is filled with forgotten, if ever known, / pasts come back to tell you who / or how you used to be…’, with the final lines summoning MacNeice’s ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’: ‘grateful as you are, you say, / for sunlight and a breeze’.
Are we ‘dying, Egypt, dying’, to pick up that memorable phrase from MacNeice, himself of course referencing Shakespeare’s Mark Antony? Perhaps not altogether, according to the general tenor of this book’s climactic sequence, ‘Ligurian Diary’, where Valéry’s dictum that ‘Il faut tenter de vivre’ finds, if not exactly a translation, then a respectful gloss. Backgrounded by a wedding in 2023, which highlights the two main areas of Robinson’s own international experience, at the marriage of a bride with Japanese and Italian parentage, the poem conjures ‘us guests / from all the compass points’ in ‘gardens where rain-laden breeze / scatters rose petals and stirs / a swapping of far-flung memories…’ Eliot’s ‘Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers’ perhaps pervades Robinson’s valedictory toast not just to the newly married couple, but to the whole assembled party, and the wider world it represents:
Then let the wind lift, white sails at distance,
look, filled full while we each try
to live and be fulfilled…