"About time too" by Peter Robinson (Carcanet, 2001)

Poems from Cortland Review, PN Review, Prairie Schooner, Shearsman, Stand, TLS, etc.

It's not lacking substance and detail - there's observation and description using slightly elevated diction and sometimes stilted syntax, with quite a lot of (often loose) rhyme. However, much of the time I have trouble seeing beyond that. Here are some passages that caught my eye because of diction, synatx, etc -

• "As fading light impinged/ at curtains, what took shape,/ in the course of views exchanged/ between one who'd to go/ and another staying behind,/ moved on from its frame" (p.26)
• "From music school windows/ came phrases, tricky scales/ on disparate pianos/ practising western intervals.// A cornet joined them as I waited,/ discords struck with every note/ promising unstated/ concertos, but that bit more remote.". I can see that the 2nd stanza has an "abab" rhyme scheme. Because of that, I assume that this 1st stanza has the same pattern. I struggle to see a pattern of beats or of syllable count. But how do the rhymes help? (p.27)
• "Not long after the rainy season's start/ our breakfast-time weather report/ predicted a deficiency of sunlight/ - as if you needed to be told,/ with that patter interrupting grey quiet/ and every umbrella unfurled.". This is "aabcbc". Subsequent stanzas are "aabcbc", "abcbca", "abacbc", but it's a struggle - why "deficiency of sunlight"? (p.31)
• "Waking, twenty-six years later,/ I suddenly remembered one/ idyllic afternoon/ we wandered through Grass Woods,/ then paddled in the stream/ - all ruined when she lost her watch,/ though whether in the dense grass cover/ or smooth-flowing river/ (and we searched both bank and water)/ that present from her Gran had gone;". That is nearly all of a poem's numbered section. The rest is "the moment and the time had gone for ever". It would have had to be a good line to save the section. I don't think I know what it means, let alone whether it's good (p.35).
• "A thick mist on the Padana plain/ did away with distances/ that morning I took an early train;/ it seemed the chaces/ of following outlines of trees/ past farms and onion campanili/ had been stolen from me/ by the weather; still, possibilities/ hidden in years' silences/ might have waited to emerge/ with filter plants at a field ditch edge,/ though patches of the dewy grass/ is all there was to see". This is another numbered section of a poem. The rhymes are clear at the start, then get looser - perhaps because of the mist. Again, the set-up seems long-winded ("did away with" as well as "stolen from me"?) and I don't understand the punch-line. The past is being equated to distance, yes, but filter plants? (p.46)
• "Then came the simple problem/ of switches, someone's name/ gasped forgetting who I am,/ shadow on a wall, a windscreen/ wiper to put out of mind,/ each unfamiliar obstacle/ to overcome if we're to find/ the other in each other's soul". It might be "abababab". I have trouble parsing it. Why should the persona put a wiper out of their mind? (p.48)
• "Houses were raised from out its path". This is line 2 of an 8-line stanza. One line has 7 syllables; all the rest have 8. There's irregular end-rhyme, maybe "XabXcbca" (other stanzas have a different number of lines and different rhyme patterns). What I don't get is why "out" is in the line. In prose it wouldn't be there. What metrical constraint is it submitting to? (p.62)
• "In fields of rape, grain, cabbage, lucerne,/ the stubborn morning sunlight searches/ as if for a love's possibilities/ and how they illuminate things." This is the end of "Changing Lines" (50+ lines). At a little train station on the lowlands of the Po, possibilities don't emerge from mist, they need to be imagined. But some trigger is needed all the same - maybe the pigeons changing places in a campanile's apertures? This ending seems too easy though (p.77)

"The Bargain" (p.58) takes up a page. What don't I get? "At La Villetta" probably has something I'm missing too.

So in the end there's too much I don't understand, which is no surprise - he's an experienced, sophisticated poet and I'm not (though to be fair, I've been in Cortland Review and Stand too). Some mitigating circumstances -

• Several of the poems are set in Italy. I'm familiar with the settings - the empty train stations, the cemeteries, etc. Maybe the poems work better on people who aren't so familiar
• With the longer poems, I have trouble coordinating the numbered sections into some kind of collective experience. Too often I found myself wondering if a section deserved inclusion.
• I think I'm in going through anti-formalist phase. In this book, constraints are half-heartedly followed and yet sacrifices (padding, mangling, gratuitous line-breaks) are made in order to follow them.