Luminous nightmare

POETRY: The Wrecking Light,By Robin Robertson, Picador Poetry, 96pp. £8.99

ROBERT LOWELL once described Sylvia Plath's Ariel as a "controlled hallucination" and there is a similar sense of the lucid nightmare in Scottish poet Robin Robertson's fourth collection, The Wrecking Light.

In poem after marvellous poem, Robertson creates a series of elusive identities. At once, the figures in his poems "have come too late", are "drowned", "ghost"-like, or "almost never there". The "smear of light" in Widow's Walkis "the sign of me leaving" he writes in dream-like horror. Robertson's

poetic vision is a peripheral one and the characters he conjures are folkloric like “the girl / with the hare-lip / down by Clachan Bridge” who cuts “up fish / to see how they worked” and “unpuzzled rabbits / to a rickle of bones”. By the end of this chilling poem “the starlings /

had started / to mimic her crying / and she'd found how to fly". Other fantastical transformations occur throughout the collection; the most astounding one is in the masterful At Roane Head, where a re-envisioning of a selkie legend throws up a remarkably moving poem:

She gave me a skylark’s egg in a bed of frost;

gave me twists of my four sons’ hair; gave me

her husband’s head in a wooden box.

Then she gave me the sealskin, and I put it on.

Lending historical context to these contemporary tales of metamorphoses are, appropriately enough, two translations from Ovid. The Daughters of Minyasresonates in a collection which is haunted by the recurring presence of daughters. In A Fall from Grace,an effecting villanelle, Robertson writes, "my daughters know / I cannot look into their clear faces / what shines back at me is shame". The poignancy of the poem is echoed in My Girlsand is countered by blank and self-incriminating poems like Venery,

He put all his doubt

to the mouth of her long body,

let her draw the night

out of him like a thorn.

She touched it, and it moved: that’s all.

The fatalistic vision drawn by Robertson is one in which the speaker has very often no control over events or time in a world both disorientating and bewildering. In About Time, he writes,

In the time it took to hold my breath

and slip under the bathwater

– to hear the blood-thud in the veins,

for me to rise to the surface –

my parents had died,

the house had been sold and now

was being demolished around me,

wall by wall, with a ball and chain.

I swim one length underwater,

pulling myself up on the other side, gasping,

to find my marriage over,

my daughters grown and settled down,

the skin loosening

from my legs and arms

and this heart going

like there’s no tomorrow.

Neither is there any escaping himself, Robertson

posits. When he does try, “there’s always / someone / wanting to sew my shadow back”. The plaintive tone

of The Wrecking Lightis wholly convincing and the

poems are written with a cold, exacting and imaginative awe. The poet's struggle with the past and the self is often subsumed in other-worldly tales. In The Wood of Lost Things, Robertson's creation is again nightmarish. "I see the dead unbury themselves", he writes in an after-life where his mother, sister, wife and daughters "have stepped through" his "shadow". There's only cold comfort here. "You're not here", he writes in the final poem, Hammersmith Winter, "now to lead me back /

to bed. None of you are. Look at the snow, / I said, to whoever might be near, I’m cold, / would you hold me, Hold me. Let me go.”

It’s still early in the year, but this surely will be one of the outstanding collections of 2010.

Paul Perry's The Last Falcon and Small Ordinanceappears from the Dedalus Press in May