I
Die ontdekking van ‘n nuwe digter is altyd ‘n ongelooflik verrykende ervaring. Só beland die Skotse digter Robin Robertson se Sailing the forest onverwags in my kerskous. ‘n Keuse uit sy digkuns. ‘n Geskenk van die digter Juanita Louw.
Die gedigte is gelade. Nadat jy ‘n vers gelees het, besef sy jy eers die impak. Bykans soos ‘n belediging. Of ‘n dwars opmerking wat jy later eers ten volle begryp.
So word die bundel bemark uitgegee in 2014 deur Farrar, Straus and Giroux:
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.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20613795-sailing-the-forest Besoek 5 Januarie 2025
Wat ‘n mens hier lees, is ‘n digter wat telkemale tegnieke ontgin. En geen digter kan ooit alle tegnieke ken of verstaan nie. Elke taal het uiteraard sy eie tradisie waarbinne die digter werk. En dis ‘n lang reis om alles te probeer begryp: Sailing the Forest inderdaad.
Hy gee ook vir die leser ‘n bronverwysing om Skotse woorde (en uitsprake) te begryp. Sy kennis van klassieke tekste wat hy herdig, is eweneens belangrik. Dionysus en Ovidius se Metamorfose is belangrik hier. Rilke en Strindberg.
Soos die betekenis van “widow’s walk”. Sheugh is ‘n Skotse woord vir ‘n sloot. Op al die aspekte sal ons die volgende weke fokus.
Dit is ‘n digter wat skryf oor operasies, begeerte, landskap, ouerskap, jeugherinneringe, die dood …
Soms komplekse verse; ander kere oop en bloot. Maar onder draai die duiwels rond.
II
Wormwood
for Don Paterson
A flight of loose stairs off the street into a high succession
of empty rooms, prolapsed chairs and a memory of women
perfumed with hand-oil and Artemisia absinthium:
wormwood to me, and to the sappy Russian sailors, chernobyl.
The scooped-back ballroom gown
shows the tell-tale bra-strap, red and tired.
‘Leave it,’ my maths master used to say at a dropped pencil,
‘it can’t fall any further.’ Well, I couldn’t, and neither could she.
‘n Aweregse liefdesvers met gevaar. Artemisia absinthium kan glo die senuweestelsel verlam.
The key
The door
to the walled garden, the place
I’d never been.
was opened
with a simple turn
of the key
I’d carried with me
all these years.
Die ontdekking dat die digter reeds oor psigiese kennis beskik het.
Dream of the Huntress
It is always the same:
she is standing over me
in the forest clearing,
a dab of blood on her cheek
from a rabbit or a deer.
I am aware of nothing
but my mutinous flesh,
and the traps of desire
sent to test it—
her bare arms, bare
shoulders, her loosened hair,
the hard, high breasts,
and under a belt
of knives and fish-lures,
her undressed wound.
Every night the same:
the slashed fetlock,
the buckling under;
I wake in her body
broken, like a gun.
Ook hierdie vers navigeer begeerte as iets gevaarliks.
Glass of Water and Coffee Pot
after Chardin
These rooms of wood, of tongue-and-groove, open out
on a garden of white-washed walls and a maple tree,
a new Spring bright among the weathered stone and brick.
We find things that are old and used, well-made, well worn
and beautiful because of this. The balance
intimate between that glass of water’s clarity and light
and the pot’s grave darkness: an order so luminous
and fine you needn’t measure it with a rule, just look.
The papery whiteness of the garlic heads is the same light
held in the water glass, the same light lifting a gleam
from the blackened coffee pot that’s somehow managed
to make it through, to find harmony here
on this stone shelf, happiness of the hand and heart,
to keep its heat and still pour clean and true.
‘n Ekfrastiese vers oor die Franse skilder Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), ‘n meester van die stillewe.
Een van sy bekende uitsprake:
“Who said one paints with colors? One employs colors, but one paints with feeling.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Sim%C3%A9on_Chardin Besoek 5 Januarie 2025
Hy vang die perfekte harmonie van die skildery vas. Hy kyk en wat hy sien, is tersaaklik.
Soos hy dig:
We find things that are old and used, well-made, well worn
and beautiful because of this.
III
Robin Robertson
B 1955
Born in Perthshire, poet Robin Robertson was brought up on the northeast coast of Scotland where, as he says in a 2008 interview, “history, legend and myth merged cohesively in the landscape.” Robertson’s early influences include the stories of Celtic and Classical myth, the vernacular ballads, and folklore. His deeply sensory poems explore notions of love and loss framed by the dialogue between the classical and the contemporary. Describing the poet’s task, Robertson tells of the desire to reveal “the refreshed world and, through a language thick with sound and connotation and metaphor, make some sense: some new connection between what is seen and felt and what is understood.” As a reviewer for the New Yorker notes, “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.”
Robertson is the author of several collections of poetry. His debut collection, A Painted Field (1997), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year Award, and was one of the Sunday Times Books of the Year. Critic and author Kazuo Ishiguro praised its “darkly chiselled poems haunted by mortality and the fragility of life’s pleasures.”
Robertson has worked at several major London publishing houses, and has edited the work of many writers, including John Banville, John Burnside, Anne Carson, J.M. Coetzee, Seamus Deane, Anne Enright, Geoffrey Hill, Michael Longley, Sharon Olds, and Peter Redgrove.
Inspired by frank conversations with writers, Robertson edited Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (2003). He has recently published The Deleted World, a selection of new versions of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer (2006) and a translation of Medea (2008).
After his second collection, Slow Air, Robertson received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His third book, Swithering (2006), won the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection of the Year.
His fourth book of poems, The Wrecking Light (2010), includes “At Roane Head,” which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Robertson is the first poet to have won all three categories in the Forward Prize. He is the author of Grimoire (2020), a poetry collection inspired by Scottish folk tales. He lives in London.
Joan Hambidge
5 Januarie 2025
Bronne:
Robertson, Robin. 2014. Sailing the Forest. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Puik. Dankie Prof.