Robin Robertson's poetry, in both his collections to date, always reminds me of Yeats's closing lines in his poem "The Fisherman": "I shall have written him one / poem maybe as cold / and passionate as the dawn". Robertson combines a cool and attentive gaze with a precise and economical clarity of expression. But there is an unsettling sensuality, for all the coolness, and a real feel for flesh, skin, muscle, blood. His first collection, A Painted Field , was full of blood-lettings, obsessed with opening up and emptying out. Its own verbal firmness and formal restraint was set in deliberate contrast to the wounds, eatings, penetrations and exsanguinations of many of the poems.
Slow Air contains a fair number of pieces in which these concerns are revisited. The aestheticisation of violence and pain reaches a self-conscious apotheosis in "Maroon, Over Black on Red", four canvas-like stanzas rendering the colours of harm and death. Other poems offer, with equal elegance, a cut thumb under water; drownings; and a creepy nightmare involving "torture with a razor blade". For those with a taste for chilling ellipsis and sheer nastiness, there is much to relish here. At times, however, one wonders whether the returns diminish with each minor variation on the theme.
Robertson's work is at its most interesting when these matters are placed in a further perspective - when a gesture is made beyond the bloodied frame of the captured spillages towards the possibility that integrity might be surrendered profitably. The opening poem begins: "We are drawn to edges, to our own / parapets and sea-walls: finding our lives / in relief, in some forked storm"; not the last image of self-definition through extremity, whether skin or clothes or habitat. But the margins of self are also limitations: "We have forgotten how to walk...looking too late to the ones we loved, / we stretch out our hands as we fall".
The very next piece is a perfectly poised love poem, offering balance and reciprocity in both its form and its content. It is one of the very few notes of exuberant joy in a dark and almost despairing collection. Elsewhere, relationships are haunted by guilt and failure. "Exposure" has the lovers "lie in grim embrace: these / two halves trying to be whole, straining / for a break in the static".
While some of Robertson's poems are wholly successful in their creation of symbols of radiating darkness, others perhaps rely too heavily on frisson and suggestion, leaving us only with intimations of undefined horror. But over the whole collection, a wounded and only partly calloused sensibility emerges. Robertson measures affectingly the distance between a damaged and self-defeating isolation and the potential relationships it necessarily excludes.