Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems

A selection of poems spanning the career of a poet of the uncanny
Filled with haunting and visionary poems, Sailing the Forest is a selection of the finest work from an essential voice in contemporary poetry. Robin Robertson’s deceptively spare and mythically charged work is beautifully brutal, ancient and immediate, and capable of instilling menace and awe into our everyday landscape. These are poems drawn in shadow, tinged with salt and blood, that disarm the reader with their precise language and dreamlike illuminations. Robertson’s unique world is a place of forked storms where Rain … is silence turned up high and we can see the hay marry the fire / and the fire walk.

Through five extraordinary collections, Robertson has captured the intangible, illusory world in razor-sharp language. The genius of this Scots poet is for finding the sensually charged moment–in a raked northern seascape, in a sexual or gustatory encounter–and depicting it in language that is simultaneously spare and ample, and reminiscent of early Heaney or Hughes (The New Yorker). Sailing the Forest reveals a wild-hearted poet at the height of his talents.