Robertson wins Forward Prize for best single poem
What, all my pretty chickens…?
This from Robin Robertson’s 2009 Forward Prize winning poem entitled ‘At Roane Head’ (dedicated to John Burnside).
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.
Powerful more for its narrative I think, in the way of ‘The Death of Actaeon’, than for how, as is more common in Robertson’s work, the individual words toil and rub and disarm together.
***
Don Paterson won this year’s Forward Prize for best collection with Rain. Paterson and Robertson, both Scots, have won three Forward Prizes each.