Return to Sendai: New & Selected Poems showcases a retrospective of the British poet Peter Robinson’s work written over a half century. Illustrating the full range of his gifts, these chosen poems and ones collected for the first time are characteristically responsive both to fresh encounters and evocative homecomings. Described as “the finest poet of his generation” (PN Review) and “a major English poet” (Poetry Review), these new and selected poems introduce American readers to some of the reasons why.

Praise for Peter Robinson

“as the accidents of life become the pattern of autobiography, the rhyme-scheme dawns out of speech, like a conviction forming itself from doubts; it grows into something understood between us, a humane arrangement of the air … Peter Robinson is in my judgment the finest poet of his generation.”
—Eric Griffiths, PN Review

“Robinson … joins a line of expatriate poets which includes Empson and Enright. The challenges for such a poet are threefold: how to negotiate with cultural difference—an especially complex problem today, when Eurocentrism has been strongly challenged; how to relate to the world he has left; and how to distinguish himself from his poetic predecessors. Robinson meets these challenges with tact and skill.”
—Nicholas Tredell, London Review of Books

“We know about ‘strong’ poets. Attention must now be paid to the ‘curiously strong’ like … Peter Robinson.”
—John Ashbery, PN Review

“Robinson’s writing is exceptional for its emotional complexity, quick thinking and broody depth. His poems have staying power, because they have the precision of thoughts and feelings long inhabited; and they have a musical quality which doesn’t make itself loudly heard but is worth listening for.”
—Peter Swaab, The Times Literary Supplement

“Robinson is the finest poet alive when it comes to the probing of shifts in atmosphere, momentary changes in the weather of the mind, each poem an astonishingly fine-tuned gauge for the pressures and processes that generate lived occasions.”
—Adam Piette, The Reader

“We need this kind of poetry.”
—Kate Price, The Reader

“Robinson is technically adept … his sound patterning binds the poems, but unobtrusively, while his sense of rhythm controls perceptions, and paces and spaces them out with uncanny skill. His language is always precise, and maintains that precision in the service of the vaguest and most fleeting sensations. The book is full of perfectly formed expressions of the half-formed, of sharply delineated renderings of the most blurred and intermediate of terrains … Robinson is an original poet.”
—Patrick McGuinness, Poetry Review

“… multilayered treatment of landscape, memory and language.”
—Belinda Cooke, Agenda

“… his is an internationally oriented sensibility and in its scrupulous attention to the here and now—or the matter in hand, call it what you will—his work has a global reach, as the increasing number of translations appearing in Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Romanian, Bulgarian and so on attests.”
—Tom Phillips, The High Window 

“Robinson’s sensibility remains firmly grounded and capable of astute political comment like this, from the mined-out innards of old certainties where a post-industrial world now wallows in thrall to globalized capital.”
—Martin Malone, The Interpreter’s House

“… the authenticity of the experiences and relationships is unquestionable. Small veracities answer for large ones … which gives the book, read from start to finish, the sense I found in it of a gradually swelling joy.”
—John Clegg, Poetry London

“… a testament to life not loss and to art’s haunting visibility.”
—Ian Brinton, The London Magazine

“Robinson is at his best when describing the strangeness of marginalia such as …  ‘a creosoted shed / with ivy busting through its boards’ … where time is distorted and realigned like perspectives in a mirror so that a return ‘home’ feels as strange as being in a foreign country.”
—Sue Hubbard, Poetry London

Return to Sendai:
New and Selected Poems
by Peter Robinson
$22.95, paperback, 244 pp
ISBN-13:  978-1-952335-92-1

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