Scots poet Robin Robertson

Reading @ Trinity University, Ruth Taylor Hall Art Gallery
Friday April 1 (no fooling!) at 4p.m.

Robinson is from the northeast coast near Perth, but has lived for many years in London, where he is currently deputy publishing director for Jonathan Cape. His debut, A PAINTED FIELD, won the 1997 Forward First Book Prize and the Scottish First Book of the Year Award, and was followed by SLOW AIR in 2002. His next book, SWITHERING, took the 2006 Forward Best Collection Prize, the Scottish Arts Council Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His latest, THE WRECKING LIGHT, was published in the UK last year and has been shortlisted for the top three British poetry awards.

Here’s one for a lovely (and surprising) cool day in Texas:

False Spring

A lift in the weather: a clemency
I cling to like the legend

of myself: self-exiled
world-wounded, god

of evenings like this,
eighty degrees and half a world away.

All night, the industry
of erasure, effacement,

our one mouth
working itself dry.

But even a god can’t stop the light
that finds us, annealed,

fruitless, to strangers
broken on the field of day.

In the window-box,
the narcissi come up blind.