Chapter 1: Who is Robin Robertson and what is his significance in poetry?
Hello and welcome to Nothing But The Poem. Well, hello and welcome to our regular Nothing But The Poem podcast. My name is Sam Tang. I'm the project coordinator here at the Scottish Poetry Library. And the poet that we're going to look at in today's NBTP is Robin Robertson. well-known Scottish poet with multiple collections to his name.
But interestingly, the long take, the substantial long poem that he wrote a few years back now was actually the first poem to be ever shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Hopefully not the last, but it was a very unique way of getting onto the Booker Prize shortlist. So we're going to be looking at a couple of poems today by Robin Robertson.
The two poems that we looked at were Cat Failing and Swimming in the Woods. We'll post the links to those poems on the podcast so that you can go to them and read them yourselves and see if our interpretations make any sense. But I'll also say which website they're on. So this first poem, Cat Failing, is on the Poetry Foundation website if you would like to follow along as we read.
I'll read it through the first time. Cat Failing A figment. A thumbed maquette of a cat. Some ditched plaything, something brought in from outside. His white fur, stiff and grey, coming apart at the seams. I study the muzzle of perished rubber, one ear eaten away, his sour body lumped like a beanbag leaking thinly into a grim towel. I sit and watch the light degrade in his eyes.
He tries and fails to climb to his chair, shirks in one corner of the kitchen, cowed, denatured, ceasing to be anything like a cat. And there's a new look in those eyes that refuse to meet mine, and it's the shame of being found out. Just that. And with that loss of face, his face, I see, has turned human. This was the poem that we opened the discussion group with, and it is grim.
The word grim is in the first stanza there, and it's had quite an emotional impact on quite a lot of the people in the group, not least because quite a lot of us have had our own cats, we've had our own
aged cats and this study of a cat denatured and cowed and ceasing to be yeah had a lot of resonance with everybody as we read it and reread it we kind of picked apart at those seams and tried to work out why it was having such an impact on us
One of the ways in which Robin Robertson's poetry works in many other different poems as well as this one is to really build our detail upon detail, really kind of concrete studies, really focused studies of the animal at hand or even the emotion at hand. A lot of his poems are very, very visceral in the kind of real sense of that word. They go into the blood and guts of things.
And here there's a very kind of unsentimental attitude to what is being pictured and imagined here. But as you say, with the detail that builds upon the images that build upon one another, It's split into two stanzas. The first stanza is all of these kind of concrete images that build up to introducing the cat.
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Chapter 2: What themes are explored in the poem 'Cat, Failing'?
I said that this was two stanzas, this poem. It's important that both stanzas are almost like mini sonnets in themselves. So there's 14 lines in both, both stanzas, so it's 28 lines. So on the face of it, they're very balanced across one another. On the page, it seems quite balanced. But in the second stanza, everything really slows down.
And starts bringing in those big themes of shame and loss of face and this, as I say, this metamorphosis of the cat into the human and the human into the cat and that kind of blurring of the face and of our vision. So it wasn't the happiest, chirpiest poem to begin our discussions with, but an important one.
And I think a way of thinking into and hearing and listening and tuning into Robin Robertson's kind of stylistic of how he uses image and not even metaphor really, just building up of image and really detailed and really significant imagery to say what he wants to say.
The second poem we looked at was a more straightforward sonnet in the sense that, and when I say straightforward, I mean much more that it's kind of classical. On the page, it's got two stanzas and it's 14 lines long and the first stanza is eight lines and the second stanza is six lines. But other than that, I think that, yeah, the sonnet form can kind of
tempt you in and beguile you because the imagery and the themes that it explores are much harder to pin down. So yeah, you can sit there and say, look, yep, this is definitely a sonnet. But at the end of the day, once you've entered into it, it becomes something even bigger than that form. So this poem is called Swimming in the Woods. You can find this one on the Poetry Archive.
And the joy of the Poetry Archive is that you can hear the poet actually reading it as well. But I'll read it to you now and have a listen out and see what you make of it on the first listen. Swimming in the Woods
Her long body in the spangled shade of the wood was a swimmer moving through a pool, fractal, finned by leaf and light, the loose plates of lozenge and rhombus, wobbling coins of sunlight, heat wavering. When she stopped, the water stopped, and the sun remade her as a tree, banded and freckled and foxed.
Besieged by symmetries condemned to these patterns of love and loss, I stare at the wet shape on the tiles till it fades. When she came and sat next to me after her swim, then walked away back to the trees, she left a dark butterfly.
When we were chatting this one through again in the group, we were really struck by the, again, the lines packed with really descriptive language that kind of, they coin new images that even in their newness feel familiar. That's how precise they are. They're so precise that they actually feel familiar. They feel right there.
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Chapter 3: How does Robin Robertson depict emotional experiences in his poetry?
So come in, borrow and enjoy. Thanks very much for listening.