Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems - Hardcover

Robin Robertson is from the north-east coast of Scotland. He has published five collections of poetry and received a number of accolades, including the Petrarca-Preis, the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and all three Forward Prizes. He has also edited a collection of essays, Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame, translated two plays of Euripides, Medea and the Bacchae, and, in 2006, published The Deleted World, a selection of free English versions of poems by the Nobel laureate Tomas Transtromer. He lives in London.

Robin Robertson is one of the finest contemporary poets, as this collection amply shows. His is a wonderful hard clear music, and the muscularity and toughness of his verse is everywhere counterpointed by a deep-lying tenderness. Sailing the Forest is a marvelously buoyant vessel. -- John Banville Robin Robertson's bracing book offers a host of pleasures: rich and briny atmospheres, the burr and bristle of a fine ear, an eye restless for exact and searing detail. But the greatest of these is watching a writer come into his own, in poems increasingly compelling and large in their embrace, their dark and lustrous landscapes fully inhabited, fully haunted. -- Mark Doty Robin Robertson is one of the finest contemporary poets, as Sailing the Forest amply shows. His is a wonderful hard clear music, and the muscularity and toughness of his verse is everywhere counterpointed by a deep-lying tenderness -- John Banville Robin Robertson's bracing book offers a host of pleasures: rich and briny atmospheres, the burr and bristle of a fine ear, an eye restless for exact and searing detail. But the greatest of these is watching a writer come into his own, in poems increasingly compelling and large in their embrace, their dark and lustrous landscapes fully inhabited, fully haunted -- Mark Doty Surely the year's poetry event. This is wonderful verse: muscular, astringent, tender and deeply felt -- John Banville, Best Books of 2014 Guardian A wonderfully generous selected poems. Great precision of language, limpid observation and a rare ability to make the narrative of the poems resonate evocatively. A ripple-effect that is remarkably profound -- William Boyd, Best Books of 2014 Guardian Read it, give it, read it aloud, give it to poetry agnostics and watch them shiver, touched by the poet's tinsel, his understanding of this light and that darkness -- Candia McWilliam, Books of the Year 2014 Sunday Herald