Peter Robinson
Peter was born in Salford
in 1953 and grew up in Liverpool. His books include Selected Poems (Carcanet
Press: 2003), The Look of Goodbye (Shearsman Books: 2008) and, most recently,
English Nettles (Two Rivers Press: 2010), illustrated by Sally Castle. He
taught for many years in Japan, and now with his wife and two daughters lives in
Reading, where he is a professor at the university.
In Jacket magazine, his poetry has been described as having a Shakespearean turn of phrase … subtle sound mimesis and unconventional rhythmic virtuosity.
Red Dusk
For Paul Lally
I’m starting from the teddy-choirboy
who taught us what painting the town red meant
in a city where you simply had to know
who’d done what on any given Saturday
at Anfield or away —
where lives would be one long might-have-been
if the referee was blind or a linesman biased;
and even though you’ll never walk alone
I could almost taste it in a smoky sky
welling up like burst blood-vessels round the gates,
full time blown, as down we went
with the rivers of red between brick terrace houses.
You remember: a sunset was blazing on the Mersey
where the battleship Potemkin — let’s say — lay
at anchor through the policemen’s strike …
Uplifted, carried forward by a dimmed red tide,
red-nosed, red-faced, we were each being sent
off into the late light of a vast inflamed eye.
© Peter Robinson