The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson

Robin Robertson is from the north-east coast of Scotland. He has published three previous collections, A Painted Field (1997), Slow Air (2002) and Swithering (2006), and has received a number of awards for his work, including the EM Forster award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and all three Forward prizes – most recently the 2009 Prize for best single poem, for "At Roane Head". Poems in The Wrecking Light pitch the power and wonder of nature against the frailty and failure of the human – including, as Adam Newey in the Guardian put it, "... creepily macabre folk tale[s] ... shot through with a sober grief at the bitter results when the wild and the human become entangled." At Roane Head for John Burnside You'd know her house by the drawn blinds – by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall, the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry. You'd tell it by the quicken and the pine that hid it from the sea and from the brief light of the sun, and by Aonghas the collie, lying at the door where he died: a rack of bones like a sprung trap. A fork of barnacle geese came over, with that slow squeak of rusty saws. The bitter sea's complaining pull and roll; a whicker of pigeons, lifting in the wood. She'd had four sons, I knew that well enough, and each one wrong. All born blind, they say, slack-jawed and simple, web-footed, rickety as sticks. Beautiful faces, I'm told, though blank as air. Someone saw them once, outside, hirpling down to the shore, chittering like rats, and said they were fine swimmers, but I would have guessed at that. Her husband left her: said they couldn't be his, they were more fish than human, said they were beglamoured, and searched their skin for the showing marks. For years she tended each difficult flame: their tight, flickering bodies. Each night she closed the scales of their eyes to smoor the fire. Until he came again, that last time, thick with drink, saying he'd had enough of this, all this witchery, and made them stand in a row by their beds, twitching. Their hands flapped; herring-eyes rolled in their heads. He went along the line relaxing them one after another with a small knife. It's said she goes out every night to lay blankets on the graves to keep them warm. It would put the heart across you, all that grief. There was an otter worrying in the leaves, a heron loping slow over the water when I came at scraich of day, back to her door. She'd hung four stones in a necklace, wore four rings on the hand that led me past the room with four small candles burning which she called 'the room of rain'. Milky smoke poured up from the grate like a waterfall in reverse and she said my name and it was the only thing and the last thing that she said. She gave me a skylark's egg in a bed of frost; gave me twists of my four sons' hair; gave me her husband's head in a wooden box. Then she gave me the sealskin, and I put it on. Strindberg in Berlin All the wrong turnings that have brought me here – debts, divorce, a court trial, and now a forced exile in this city and this drinking cell, Zum schwarzen Ferkel, The Black Piglet: neither home nor hiding place, just another indignity, just a different make of hell. Outside, a world of people queuing to stand in my light, and that sound far in the distance, of my life labouring to catch up. I've now pulled out every good tooth in search of the one that was making me mad. I squint at the flasks and alembics, head like a wasps' nest, and pour myself three fingers and a fresh start. A glass of aqua vitae, a straightener, stiffener, a universal tincture – same again – the great purifier, clarifier, a steadying hand on the dancing hand, – one more, if you wouldn't mind – bringer of spirit and the spirit of love; the cleansing fire, turning lead to gold, the dead back into life. The Pole at the piano, of course; Munch opposite me, his face like a shirt done up wrong. My fiancée in one corner, my lover in another, merging, turning, as all women turn, back into my daughters, and I am swimming naked at night, off the island, in the witch-fire of mareld light, listening to the silence of the stars, with my children beside me, my beautiful lost children, in the swell of the night, swimming beside me. And back, to the bright salts and acids, the spill and clamour of the bar, the elixirs, the women: my wife-to-be, my young lover – one banked hearth, one unattended fire. Christ. The hot accelerant of drink. The rot of desire. And out, into the swinging dark, a moon of mercury, lines of vitriol trees and the loose earth that rises up, drops on me, burying me, night after night after night. Beginning to Green I find a kind of hope here, in this homelessness, in this place where no one knows me – where I'll be gone, like some over-wintering bird, before they even notice. Healed by distance and a landscape opening under broken sun, I like this mirror-less, flawless world with no people in it, only birds. Unmissed, I can see myself again in this great unfurling – the song, the fledged leaf, the wing; in these strong trees that twist from the bud: their grey beginning to green.