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The Look of Goodbye contains Peter Robinson's poetry from his last half dozen years living and working in Sendai and Kyoto. Difficulties associated with having your heart in Europe and your life in Japan are explored across the shadowy terrains of a world grown decidedly more at risk, dangerous, and violent. The stays of love, friendship, family, place, and memory are tested by death, loss, and displacement; yet Robinson's poetry celebrates all that it can by means of the poet's rhythm, formal dexterity, and his eye for the energized processes of landscape and atmosphere. Composed at the same time as their author began to write and publish aphorisms, these poems show Robinson extending his range of subjects and developing the fresh directness with which he treats them. While bidding farewell to his Japanese years, The Look of Goodbye is as welcoming of readers, new and returning, as ever.
About the author
Peter Robinson is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, together with translations, aphorisms, short fiction and criticism. He has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations. His recent publications include Collected Poems 1976-2016 (Shearsman Books), and a novel, September in the Rain (Holland House Books). He has edited the occasional prose of Roy Fisher and the complete poetry of Bernard Spencer, as well as editing critical volumes on both poets. He has published three books of criticism with Oxford University Press and one with Liverpool University Press, and is also a noted translator of modern Italian poetry.
