This new book of three poem sequences opens with a quote from René Char, who states that
History is a long succession of words
leading to the same conclusions.
To contradict them is our duty.
Colin Campbell Robinson sees contradiction as a form of resistance which offers clarity, whereas confusion creates collaboration (with the forces of occupation, the enemy). Although rooted in response to the written works of René Char and Yannis Ritsos, both of whom were part of resistance movements, and Josef Koudelka’s photographs of Prague in 1968, it is hard to see Robinson’s prose poem sequences here as more than abstractions.
The work here rambles through an empty city peopled by memories, ghosts who betray, hide, suffer and survive. ‘Everyone is a vagabond in their own home. / Everyone a wanderer lying in their bed.’ Times passes, indeed ‘Time is running out’ and the future is tentative as ‘The angels of tomorrow soar on fragile wings.’ It is a world of brief pleasures – pilsner or ‘a sip of slivovitz’ – failures, ruin and silence; a world where nothing is understood and ‘people stand about doing nothing’ and there is ‘no certainty’.
By inhabiting others’ experiences Robinson ends up in a no-man’s land of secondhand politics and emotions. This is not to belittle Ritsos’ or Char’s poems – both are great writers – nor to demand poems of personal emotion from Robinson, but the sense of distance here is too great: Robinson is a mirror, a reporter, whose words from the present describing the past cannot evoke the realities of oppression or revolutionary resistance. It all feels like a sanitised version, where blood and sweat, Molotov cocktails, sniper fire and the arrival of tanks and soldiers become fading photographs or ‘a rumbling that fades into the distance’.
At one point the final poem’s narrator attempts to pray, but the silence is too much; instead, we get ‘So many Cains, so many Abels, looking for God’s embrace, in the cold dawn, in the dying dusk’, and smashed firebombs provoking the rhetorical question ‘who dances before the Lord?’. The reference to the Psalms, and the text’s juxtaposition with a photo of ‘the oldest synagogue in Europe’ does little to evoke Prague’s ghetto, the story of the Golem, or the very physical act of occupation and dismantling of Prague’s Westernisation in 1968. It simply sends out vague arrows towards ideas Robinson could have made something of.
This book is a world of shorthand, of suggestive phrases and ideas meant to trigger a reader’s feelings: a sense of loss, of hopelessness, of squashed possibility, of mourning, of lost community and family. A dove is used to suggest ideas of peace; a church bell rings, signifying mourning, religion, time passing and perhaps contrasting with the empty city’s silence; ‘Coincidental meanings could collide and create new sense as they speed beyond light’. I’m all for constructing meaning out of experimental or opaque texts, but there is too much signification going on here, too much ‘space’ and ‘light’ and ‘silence’ and ‘blindness’, too many words pre-loaded with meaning, to allow new coincidences or associations to be made.
The poems here mostly feel like pastiche and, in the third sequence, a poetical tour guide to Prague. It made me go back to Ritsos, a favourite author anyway, to the experimental photos of Jiri Kolar, and to contemporaneous accounts of resistance and revolution in France, Greece and Prague. These show the reality, the brutality, of war; whilst the anarchic and utopian poetry of the likes of Adrian Mitchell or Julian Beck propose political, sexual and social revolutions. Robinson’s poetry offers ‘The night eternal dark like a book not written; like a slogan, empty’, but I would rather an attempted book or a revolutionary slogan than this author’s abstract ‘pain of intuition’.
Rupert Loydell 19th June 2025
I must thank Rupert for drawing attention to my book Resistance despite the completely negative critique he proffered. Perhaps all is fair in criticism but personally I believe if you don’t have something positive or constructive to say it is best not to say it. After all we’re dealing here not with the powerful or people with real influence but with people like ourselves trying to make sense of a world through a poetic sensibility. We fail and fail again, as Sam would have it, but perhaps with each others support we may fail better.
It seems however Rupert needed to express in vitriolic terms his view of my failure with Resistance. This failure seems to bound up with the fact I have not been involved in violent insurrection or had not mixed the odd molotov cocktail or two. Therefore my exploration of resistance bears no gravitas and can easily be dismissed. In this way Rupert claims I’d sanitised resistance and revolutionary activities.
As is common in this type of criticism Rupert quotes statements from the book completely out of context. I’ll give this as an example.
‘The work here rambles through an empty city peopled by memories, ghosts who betray, hide, suffer and survive. ‘Everyone is a vagabond in their own home. / Everyone a wanderer lying in their bed.’ Times passes, indeed ‘Time is running out’ and the future is tentative as ‘The angels of tomorrow soar on fragile wings.’ It is a world of brief pleasures – pilsner or ‘a sip of slivovitz’ – failures, ruin and silence; a world where nothing is understood and ‘people stand about doing nothing’ and there is ‘no certainty’.
This is at the root of the matter, Rupert makes the mistake that these sentences relate to an historical situation yet what they are actually describing is the world we inhabit now. Consequently, the pressing need for resistance.
The polyphonic nature of Resistance completely eludes Rupert although he has used such techniques himself. Not all, in fact very few of the voices in Resistance am ‘I’. In fact one of the examples he uses in the final sentence of his critique is; ‘but I would rather an attempted book or a revolutionary slogan than this author’s abstract ‘pain of intuition’. The ‘pain of intuition’ is in fact from a poem by Rene Char.
Finally, as for the three, maybe more readers, who ‘liked’ this review I wonder who actually read the book and fervently agreed or was it the visceral enjoyment of vitriol which has become such a feature of contemporary discourse and is a prime reason any coherent resistance to current circumstances flails. We hit out at our comrades because they are not pure enough in their faith and the enemy applauds because as long as we’re divided they rule supreme.
I’m sorry that you read my review as vitriol. In no way do I feel it is abusive, simply because it is a response to the words and poems in the book under consideration, a personal ‘report’ on my reading. I’m afraid I don’t buy into the idea of poetic comradeship and non-criticism, any more than thinking that poetry can somehow change the world. I may feel inspired by the likes of Julian Beck and Adrian Mitchell, but that is different from resistance or revolution. I do not expect an author to write from an autobiographical standpoint, but I do like language that provokes, questions, challenges and disrupts itself. For me, Resistance did not do this; for others it may. In the end the book – like all books – has to stand on its own two feet and be (mis)understood by readers.
Thank you for answering my comments. What you say is fair enough. It was because you had been a good supporter of mine in the past that I was hurt by your comments. You, of course, have every right to criticise work that you think fails to communicate effectively and I, as writer, however insignificant, have to expect sometimes people will express this quite forcefully. Now that it has happened once I’ll be better able to accept it in the future. Perhaps if I do get the opportunity to publish again you will find it more to your liking and you’ll write an equally forceful recommendation. Until then, best wishes from me. Colin