Robin Robertson's first book introduces one of the most powerful new writers to come out of Scotland in the 1990s. From the drama and menace of his celebrated version of Ovid, 'The Flaying of Marsyas', to the intimacy of poems that examine the wounds of memory and desire or deal with personal or national identity and its erosion, the range is impressive and the voice entirely original. This is poetry remarkable for its sombre music; its clarity, its sensuousness and its vigour. A Painted Field culminates in 'Camera Obscura', an extended sequence in which Robertson uses the imagined diary of the pioneering Victorian photographer David Octavious Hill, counterpointed by a contemporary poetic narrative of the city of Edinburgh, to portray a life in crisis and the last flowering of the Scottish Enlightenment. This will take its place among the finest poems of recent years.
