Ravishing Europa, Peter Robinson’s eleventh collection, marks a wholly unexpected development in the poet’s work, prompted, as evident throughout, by the fissures exported from a political party to an entire country and beyond by the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union. Its consequences cast crucial events for this poet, both personal and public, into unforeseen fresh lights. Prompted by a televised debate to wonder in the title poem upon what impulse the founding European myth is based, Robinson’s new poems search through his individual and cultural memory to offer, as the book unfolds, an answer.
Roy Fisher’s observation that Peter Robinson is ‘alert for the moments when tectonic plates of mental experience slide quietly one beneath another to create paradoxes and complexities that call for poems to be made’ could not be more apt for Ravishing Europa, whose every line is carefully listening in to our interesting times.