Anthony Robinson |
The Boundary Layer | |||||
Robinson’s
poetry is ravishingly imagined, viscerally conveyed, and partakes equally
of traditional and modernist forms, like a Shaker deacon whiting up the
darkness with an abstract ballet. At its best, in poems like “There’s
a Storm Coming In” and “Naoussa,” this is verse that
stuns you, makes you lay the page down on the table with trembling hands,
as Emily Dickinson said of the finest poetic expression. His images pierce
you with uneasy reminders that the perilous and contingent infuse the
commonplace, and that “[A]ll things,” as Yeats said, “hang
like a drop of dew/Upon a blade of grass.” Like the cloud
chamber photographs that open each section of Anthony Robinson’s
The Boundary Layer, there is an overlay of abstract science in
opposition to and, perhaps, in cunning conspiracy with, the “glistening
purple and white-vernixed” life that flows just beneath the surface
of so many of these poems. From capturing the ramifications of the birth
miracle from a contemporary male perspective (“In the Company of
Women”) to the erotically-charged fear of the dream wraith who approaches
“like a wolf in an old disguise” (“Sometimes She Comes
to Me”), this is poetry of both precision and concision, keenly-observed
and deeply felt. Tony Robinson’s
gift for bringing together ancient and modern, physical and spiritual
in his poetic images is remarkable and rare. His imagination is given
naturally to traversing the ladder of analogy—Dante’s levels
of meaning—in such a way that the literal and the anagogical hold
fluid commerce together. Anthony Robinson was born in Portland, Maine and raised in Boston. He was educated in Philosophy and English at Berkeley and he began his career as a designer and builder in the desert in Arizona. He is Co-Editor and Publisher of Transformation: A Journal of Literature, Ideas & the Arts, and he teaches Environmental Sustainability at Southern Methodist University. Visit Anthony Robinson
at www.aprlit.com
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ISBN
978-1-897430-67-5 Poetry 60 pages $21.95 6 x 9 Now Available |
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