"The Long Take" by Robin Robertson (Picador, 2018)

Written as a long poem, but on shortlists for novel prizes.

It's 1946. New York. Walker, an ex-soldier from Cape Cod, Canada who served in Normandy, Belgium and Holland is looking for work. There's much imagery, some better than others.

• So this is what happens between one night and the next: this is day. A never-ending rehearsal with a cast that changes all he time but never gets it right (p.5)
• The city's gone./ In its place, this gray stone maze, this/ locked geometry of shadows, blind and black,/ and angles hurt into the sky, symmetries breaking/ and snapping back into line. (p.5)
• Going up the Empire State it's like "A ladder at the center of a maze/ he climbs to see where he is,/ where he went wrong" (p.29)
• The subways are rivers, underground,/ flash-flooding every five minutes/ in a pulse of people. (p.7)
• "Central Park: a clearing/ in this forest of stone" isn't so good.

After a year working in the docks he spends all his savings on a train ticket to LA. He finds Billy straight away, who gives him some useful tips. He looks for him on the street every so often over the years. He becomes a reporter, and drinks with colleagues, never knowing them that well. He visits film sets. He's sent on an assignment to SF, then returns. Nobody likes colleague Pike who's trying to impress bosses - "Pike was always in a movie, the cameras always rolling". Walker's haunted by war memories, which thanks to the episodic, fragmented style are easily inserted -

5.30, Sunday morning, a man with a hose preceded him up Main Street, fanning an aisle through the Styrofoam, food wrappers, cigarette packets, torn shirts, snapped stilettos and the sour mulch of broken glass, blood and butts and sick - moving like a priest with a censer, hosing the center down * The rating withe bilge-bucket is swilling off the puke, and what was left of Joe McPherson who hadn't timed it right, his jump from the nets to this landing craft below. (p.44)

Here are some of the more memorable/thematic phrases -

• Billy says 'Los Angeles is like a fridge or a car now,/ it's built to break, so it's temporary./ When you get tired of your world you just upgrade'
• the watermelons/ cleavered: falling open, rocking/ slowly into still and perfect halves (p.60)
• Old men were out, on corners, watching the world,/ stroking cats and dogs, chatting, picking up scraps of litter/ and looking at them, directing trucks as they reversed - p.73
• He'd had some kind of a stroke/ and his face dragged down on one side, like it had/ missed a button - p.75
• He'd come to know, over time, to only watch/ what women hide,/ not what they show - p.86
• Stage machinery, with the grillwork balconies,/ roped proscenium, bright acoustic, the light-well drop.// This hidden dream of another century's Europe/ here, right here on Broadway - p.96
• He dreamt a plane carrying troops crashed-landed/ onto the cemetery outside Caen, and the long-dead/ were churned up with the newly-dead/ and he had to walk through it all./ Looking for himself - p.138
• In Cape Breton there was just the past./ Here in California, they're only thinking about the future -/ the past is being torn down every day - p.154
• The river ... is a bed of coiled silver, springs and movements, an escapement of minnows on the face of the water; the long shadows of trout lying like clock-hands under the stones - p.188
• Benjamin took some shrapnel in his throat: his windpipe torn open, so he's gargling blood and staring at me, fumbling at his neck like he feels his napkin is sipping - p.190
• He coughed a little blood then and, as if embarrassed to be dying, covered his face and went still - p.201

Right at the end Walker tracks Billy down to confess that he killed a German in cold blood. It takes a while for us to get to know Walker. Others have trouble too. He hears colleagues talk about him - 'You can't get an angle on Walker, y'know?/ He's a tricky bastard - not easy at all./ Like trying to catch a dropped knife.' (p.154). On p.174, Jan 1955, we learn he's 34. He has War flashbacks. Noises still scare him - New Year's Eve fireworks. Demolition reminds him of Normandy. He sees analogies. There's a section towards the end where paragraphs about the war alternative with ones from the present. He empathises with the homeless. He sends postcards to his ex back in Canada. He sometimes buys whores. He's a watcher. At the end there's a real or imagined earthquake.

There are many kinds of readers. They won't all like the same things. One option for the writer is to throw in various types of material hoping that each reader will pick out the parts that suit them. If they're editors or writers they might be pretty good at that. But what do they do about the material that doesn't suit them. Suppose, rather than feeling neutral about it they don't like it? How does the writer encourage the reader to be indulgent?

With a novel one tolerates the odd longeur - half a page isn't much lost time because one's reading quickly. With a poem one tolerates discontinuities, one delays trying to understand. It helps to use different fonts for different types of entries, to use line-breaks in some sections but not others. Star-separated sections help too - parts that are disliked are easily discarded.

6 pages of notes at the end attest to the authenticity.

Other reviews

• John Banville (composed in a mixture of verse and prose. It is a beautiful, vigorous and achingly melancholy hymn to the common man that is as unexpected as it is daring. Here we have a poet at the peak of his symphonic powers taking a great risk, and succeeding gloriously.)
• Anna Tipton (The form of the book is difficult to categorize, moving between free verse, lyrical prose, diary entries, and photographs. )
• Sibbie O'Sullivan (Moving between poetry and prose, dialogue and history, Robin Robertson’s “The Long Take” is a propulsive verbal tour de force. ... The juxtaposition of poetry and prose dissolves the psychological distance between Walker’s past and his present. His diary entries, initially objective, soon become introspective, fueling his self-destruction. )
• Brian Morton (much of The Long Take seems to work just as well when set out as prose. Sure, it’s written in verse lines, albeit without rhyme or assonance, but parts of it are almost discursive in tone. It appears in a poetry imprint, and in an unfamiliar trade format, but it is unmistakably a novel. ... Walker is that other modernist trope, a camera eye, shuttering the cityscape in a series of vivid monochromes. One of the book’s attractive but disturbing oddities is the juxtaposition of ‘still’ images you wish might quicken into motion and moving images that you very much hope will stop soon. ... Sometimes, though, the detail trips, especially when the research is too obviously flagged. ... Robertson understands that poetry can survive not just discord but also a prosaic plainness. There are passages in The Long Take that might come from Lewis Mumford or Jane Jacobs, but their presence doesn’t diminish but instead enhances the musicality of the whole structure.)
• John McAuliffe (The verse novel is an unusual genre, emphasising intensity and tone with its line-breaks and stanzas. Robertson intersperses present-tense narration with italicised flashbacks and bold-type excerpts from postcards and diaries that gesture at a gently pastoral reminiscence of a teenage love affair in Nova Scotia, but the overall effect is uneven and bitty. ... The book’s disturbing, powerful depiction of traumatic violence and its reverberating aftermath might have been better served by a shorter take.)
• Woody Haut (although The Long Take is definitely a poem, I can’t think of anything quite like it. There is, of course, Kevin Young’s recent Black Maria (2005) ... The Long Take, set mostly in and around Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill from 1946 to 1957, and subtitled “A Way to Lose More Slowly,” is considerably more modern, complex, political, and, though cinematic, probably less filmable than March’s narratives. It’s also more sustained and situated in the real world than Young’s excellent episodic endeavor. And despite its peregrinations in time, place, and rhythm, Robertson’s poem, when it comes to its inner workings, is also surprisingly novelistic. ... Since noir is the spirit of the time, and Bunker Hill is a de facto film set, Walker cannot help but co-opt the language, imagery, and perspective of that genre. ... Though the poem’s diffuseness tends to lessen its visceral impact, The Long Take remains a remarkable work. An occasional phrase may be out of sync with the era, like “watching each other’s back” or “getting totalled,” and there are moments when the poem, introduced by a map of old Bunker Hill, reads like a tourist guide to the city’s noir hot spots. But, for the most part, Robertson gets it right,)

"A painted field" by Robin Robertson (Picador, 1997)

How about this as a way to describe effortless flight - "A bird finds an open channel in the air/ and follows it without exertion to the branch" (p.4) - or this, depicting a lightning flash - "Lightning flexes: a man chalked on a board, reeling,/ exact, elementary, flawed; at each kick, birds flinch/ and scatter from the white lawn" (p.4)?

He can pack much imagery in without contorting the syntax. Consider for example "Stone circles of sheep/ in the drowned field/ watch helicopters come/ dreaming over hedges:/ horse-flies the size of houses,/ great machines/ for opening the air,/ and shaking it shut" (p.6)

The language can become more prosey - "No one watches the soldiers/ walking backwards on patrol:/ the cellophane crackle of radios,/ the call and answer/ as they stroll, each cradling/ a weapon like a newborn child" (p.6)

Does this style let him deal with people too? Here's an early attempt - "he cannot tell her how the open night/ swings like a door without her,/ how he is the lock/ and she is the key" (p.8). What about mourning? - "Death is first absence, then a presence/ of the dead amongst the living:/ the kick of grief like a turning fin, that whelms/ but cannot break the surface ... We have tasted salt;/ we feel our eyes shine" (p.22)

I'm less convinced by the following, about lighting a hearth fire, though it begins ok - "the lung of paper sucked in/ and suddenly lit from behind:/ a roaring diorama;/ the long throats of fire, feasting,// hungry for news. The page is read,/ then reddened, then consumed." (p.44)

The book ends with "Camera Obscura" a 27-page mix of poetry, biography and quotes from "She moved through the fair" - maybe it's good, but it's not my type of thing.

"Hill of Doors" by Robin Robertson (Picador, 2013)

There are several "after Ovid poems. Not my type of thing. And several other other poems hit my blindspots: "Flags and salutes" is very minor. Ditto "A & E", "The dead sound", "Port na h-Abhainne". "Tillydrone Motte" reads like an easy-going autobiographical, nostalgic article. He also looks back at life/childhood in "A childhood", "Fugitive in London" (telegraphed punchline) and "The key" (an ending I've seen before).

"Under Beinn Ruadhainn" reminds me of "The Lammas Hireling", but more prosey. "The Dream House" is all plot, some predictable. It should have been flash fiction. The last line is good. In "A Quick Death" we're given a figurative description of a lobster with a compression that belongs in a poetry book ("a clacking samurai in lacquered plates"), then we're told that the lobster's in a restaurant fish-tank, a worthwhile twist. But the punch-line's a let-down - "it's the same for us in the end -/ a short journey: eyes first/ into the fire".

There are recognisably poetic fragments, but too little momentum, too much that's competently routine -

• "cats crying that dreadful way they have,/ like the sound of babies singing/ lullabies to other babies" (p.7)
• In "The Fishermen's Farewell" "Their long stares mark them apart ... And down by the quay/ past empty pots, unmended nets and boats:// this tiny bar, where men sleep upright/ in their own element, as seals."
• "Frontera, she said,/ pointing in all directions./ There was nothing there." (p.29)

Other reviews

• Adam Newey (a book that concentrates on the conjunctions between the brutish, the human and the divine. ... The world of Robertson's poems tends to be one governed by unfathomable and harsh impulses and imperatives, whether they're dealing with mythic characters or those from our own reality. ... Thematically, Hill of Doors is of a piece with Robertson's superb 2010 collection The Wrecking Light, which was shortlisted for the big three prizes (Forward, Costa and TS Eliot). There are similar dreamscapes, abandoned houses, echoes of an extinguished human presence reclaimed by nature, and a similarly flinty beauty to the imagery. It's perhaps a little more uneven than the earlier book, with a couple of poems striking what seems to me an uncertain note)
• Kate Kellaway ("The Dream House' is one of the most pleasing poems. It is almost perfect, except that the frisson of the last line does not quite come off: it tells us too much and not enough.)
• Omar Sabbagh (Robertson’s work in this collection is both formally taut, with a wonderful sense of line and line-break, as well as filled with what for want of a better word one might dub great yarns. ... The last poem, ‘The Key’ is indeed reminiscent in its curt conceit of Kafka’s ‘Parable of the Law’ in The Trial, or of the similar mythos in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, both being dystopian versions of, say, Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. The ‘door’ in a place ‘I’d never been’ is opened at the last by ‘the key / I’d carried with me / all these years.’ Perhaps the hill is climbed ‘after’ all, with the poet’s last cadence: love out of death, rather than love as (a form of) living death.)
• Andy Brown (a truly admirable addition to his oeuvre. Robertson writes beautiful lyric poems, sometimes with the suggestion of traditional form behind them but, more often than not, in a pulsing, stanzaic verse. ... Robertson's lines come with such lyric assuredness, it's like listening to a great composer of chamber music: dark and light, soft and crescending, angry, happy and sad: the full range. ... Another superb book of poems from the master of lyric and emotional chiaroscuro )
• Lucy Burns (How is there space enough in the collection for a poem like “The Key” )

"The Wrecking Light" by Robin Robertson (Picador, 2010)

Over 90 pages, some of them as full as prose pages. And there are 4 pages of notes. The first poem, "Album", begins

I am almost never there, in these old photographs: a hand or shoulder, out of focus; a figure in the background, stepping from the frame. I see myself, sometimes, in the restless blur of a child

which reminded me a little of "In childhood memories I am never still. Being bathed, running towards the camera with fists clenched, or crashing my tricycle into kitchen chairs, I'm always slightly blurred", the start of one of my old stories. In the second stanza it says "When you finally see me,/ you'll see me everywhere" ending with a description of the narrator - "this smoke/ in the emulsion, the flaw./ A ghost is there; the ghost gets up to go". Meanwhile, the poem mentions "smear of light ... sandcastles ... fallen leaves ... melting snowmen". Not quite a standard nostalgia/old-photos poem, but close.

The title of the next poem, "Signs on a white field", hints of semiotics, openfield poetry, or poetry-about-poetry. It begins with "The sun's hinge on the burnt horizon/ has woken the sealed lake,/ leaving a sleeve of sound". Many more analogies ensue. They're still going at the foot of the first page - "A living lens of ice; you can hear it bending./ breathing, re-adjusting its weight and light/ as the hidden tons of water/ swell and stretch underneath,/ thickening with cold./ A low grumble, a lingering vibrato, creaks/ that seem to echo back and forth for hours.". Eventually "And then it comes./ The detonating crack, like a dropped plank,/ as if the whole lake has snapped in two/ and the world will follow.". Next morning the narrator clears a patch of ice away - "The green leaf looks back, and sees/ a man walking out in this shuddering light/ to the sound of air under the ice,/ out onto the lake, among sun-cups, snow penitents: a drowned man, waked/ in this weathering ground". I don't really get that ending.

The third poem "By Clachan Bridge" is nearly a Flash Fiction fable. A hair-lipped girl dissects animals by a bridge "to see how they worked". Then "the blacksmith's son,/ the simpleton,/ came down here once/ and fathomed her." Her belly grew for at least a year. She said she had a stone-baby inside (the notes explain what that is). The poem ends with "Last thing I heard, the starlings/ had started/ to mimic her crying,/ and she'd found how to fly".

Already, only 3 poems in, I'm tempted to generalize - the poetry's easy-paced, prepared to have more than one attempt to say something. The concrete detail is ornamented by simile. The endings are the only obscure part.

Vidyan Ravinthiran writes about a kind of poetic voice used by some US poets that is "determined to let us see, as poems usually don’t, the prosy groundwork which leads up to the moment of lyrical transcendence. Unlike traditional lyricism, which takes the earnest intensity of every word as a given and asks of the reader a complicity with its procedures which occasionally appears unearned, this style approaches uplift, recognition and beauty gradually, through a responsible distilling of prose sense". As Ravinthiran suggests, perhaps this is Robertson's method, adding "There aren’t that many poets recently published by the big mainstream presses who take risks like this with the poetic line – risks which some, of course, are going to find fatuous and uninteresting".

Part of me thinks this style is unambitious, albeit pleasant. I can imagine non-mainstream poets disliking his work; he doesn't challenge language. Another part of me feels suspicious and manipulated. If you want to make a text seem deeper than it is without appearing pretentious and elitist, you can try adding line-breaks, eliminating commentary/argument, and adding equivocal/obscure endings. The white-space is over-worked, as is "the poetry effect". Some pieces are almost found poems - "Law of the Island" and "Kalighat" might have been paragraphs from Orwell essays of understated outrage. "An ambush" reports without commenting, but at least it's an interesting report. What, however, is one to make of "Wonderland", "The Tweed", "Going to ground", "A gift" or "Leaving"? I'd rather the poet took risks with the content rather than line-breaks. Take, for example, the start of "Ode to a large tuna in the market" - "Here, amongst the market vegetables, this torpedo from the ocean depths, a missile that swam, now lying in front of me dead". Is "ocean" needed? Does "a missile that swam" render the previous clause superfluous? And does it take 10 line-breaks to say this? It's "after Neruda" so perhaps we can blame the original. I like "At Roane Head", but it works for me despite the line-breaks.

There are several "after ..." poems (Ovid, Neruda, Montale) which add less variety than one might expect, and some "for ..." poems (John Burnside, Thomas Transtromer, etc). "Fall from Grace" is a loose villanelle. "Middle Watch, Hammersmith" is short - it could easily end a story or be a jotting in a scrap-book. Several other poems have that feels too - no less likeable for that.

He can observe and describe, stringing similes/analogies together. He knows what to leave out (and not just for aesthetic reasons), though if something's worth saying, it's worth repeating with variation. He's uneconomical with line-breaks. I suspect that though mean line-lengths vary from poem to poem, mean sentence lengths are fairly uniform. Tone and diction vary little. He doesn't speak in voices. He's rather attracted to describing situations where an individual is affected (not overawed) by Nature, or when someone feels that something's not quite right but can't put their finger on it. He can do Fable à la Duhig's "The Lammas Hireling". Several of his poems end where where I'd be starting to get into my prose stride.

Other reviews

• Adam Newey (Guardian) (the speaker of these poems often teeters on the edge of self-undoing, looking forward and back and uncertain whether he is the watcher or the watched. ... There's a strong sense here that ­displacement and deracination are our inevitable lot, but there's also hope to be found in distance, in the free exercise of the self-critical mind ... The Wrecking Light is a work of extraordinary visionary power, its music bleak and beautiful, spare and unsparing)
• Lorraine Martinuik (Open Letter Monthly) (The construction of the second strophe creates that focus. The lines lengthen progressively, from the three-syllable declaration "They stood, then" to the pivotal "to read that flex of silver." This, the longest line in the strophe, reveals what the reader needs to know to complete the picture. From there the lines shorten progressively, to the concluding "and plummet-dive," as the narrator reinforces the reader’s realization ... The movement of line-lengths and stresses creates a narrative arc that rises and falls with the phrasing. ... Sense of place underpins many of the poems)
• Vidyan Ravinthiran (Poetry Matters)
• Isobel James (Edinburgh Book Review) (An unwillingness to depart or escape is one of Robertson’s fixations. Lyrical yet abrupt, measured yet indulgent, the poet’s voice fills his own poetic absences.)
• Fiona Moore (I’ve reviewed it in order to try to understand why I don’t like it, despite my admiration for Robertson’s skill ... The intense tone of The Wrecking Light doesn’t vary much. Nor does the form: Robertson writes mostly iambic lines, of varying length, with great skill. He seems to have achieved line-break perfection.)
• Helen Vendler (New York Review of Books)
• Kate Dempsey
• Erin Feldman (Rattle)
• Julia