Peter Robinson (poet)

Born Salford, Lancashire, the son of an Anglican curate and geography teacher, Peter Robinson grew up, with the exception of five years spent in Wigan (1962-1967), in poor urban parishes of north and south Liverpool.

Stephen Romer described it as ‘love poetry of an exemplary kind’ in the Times Literary Supplement (19 Aug 1988) and John Kerrigan found in it ‘a miracle of balance’ in the London Review of Books (13 Oct 1988).

His critical standing was underlined by The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, a collection of fourteen essays with a bibliography (1976–2006), edited by Adam Piette and Katy Price.

It’s as if he carries a listening device, alert for the moments when the tectonic plates of mental experience slide quietly one beneath another to create paradoxes and complexities that call for poems to be made.

A review of The Returning Sky (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for the Spring quarter) in the Autumn 2012 issue of Poetry Review (102/3)described Robinson as 'a major English poet', and Peter Riley noticed that his 'poems exploit a paradox: the sense of meticulously careful writing which places the poet in complete control, reinforced by his access to formalities of metre and rhyme when he needs them, work to undermine his self-security, his sense of standing firmly on the ground.

[18] Individual poems by Peter Robinson have been translated into Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian,[19] Japanese, Macedonian, Romanian,[20] and Spanish.

John Welle recommended the translations of Luciano Erba (2007) in a jacket comment as 'marvelously attuned … accurate, carefully crafted, and in harmony with the idiom and spirit of the originals.'

'[23] Robinson has published a selection of aphorisms called Spirits of the Stair in 2009, Foreigners, Drunks and Babies: Eleven Stories in 2013, a collection of prose poetry and memoirs entitled The Draft Will (2015) and a novel, September in the Rain in 2016.

His fiction has been noticed, with David Cooke writing in The London Magazine that the collection of short stories is 'an impressive body of work that deserves to gain a wider readership', while Paula Byrne wrote that 'September in the Rain is a novel of extraordinary beauty and courage', Jonathan Coe found in it 'a kind of redemption thanks to the tone or rueful, quizzical honesty', and Giles Foden saw it as 'a triumph of style, its sentences being assayed with a poet's feeling for the weight of each word.'

[24] Peter Robinson: A Portrait of his Work appeared in October 2021 edited by Tom Phillips and with chapters on many aspects of his writings by Ian Brinton, Peter Carpenter, Tony Crowley, Martin Dodsworth, Andrew Houwen, Miki Iwata, James Peake, Piers Pennington, Adam Piette, Elaine Randell, Anna Saroldi, Matthew Sperling and Alison Stone, with an up-to-date Bibliography by Derek Slade.

In September 2021 a first tranche of Robinson's archive, composed of publications, correspondence, notebooks, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs and related papers was deposited at the University of Reading's Special Collections.