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
