Peter Robinson was born in 1953 in the industrial North West of England. He spent much of his childhood in Liverpool, and was educated at the universities of York and Cambridge. During the 1970s and 80s he taught for various institutions, co-edited two poetry magazines, and was involved with the Cambridge Poetry Festival. Since 1989, he has been a professor of English Literature in Japan, at present in Kyoto, where he lives with his wife and their two daughters. Peter Robinson's books of poetry include Overdrawn Account, This Other Life, Entertaining Fates, Lost and Found, About Time Too and Anywhere You Like. He has edited the poems of Adrian Stokes, a collection of essays on Geoffrey Hill, and an anthology, Liverpool Accents: Seven Poets and a City. He has also published three critical books, In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets; Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen and Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations.

Photo of Peter Robinson by Margaret de Vaux

There are Avenues
Peter Robinson's new poem is a series of prodigal's returns to the city of Liverpool where he was first brought at the age of three, and to which he has been returning ever since. It revisits memory and expectation, the public and private, the rooted and estranged, with vividness and lyrical finesse.

Belinda Cooke, reviewing the poem for Shearsman here, concluded: 'The nuances of There are Avenues allow the reader to share Robinson's experience of self-definition, creating poetry of substance that it is difficult to exhaust - poetry that endures.'

A story
You can read a short story by Peter Robinson set in Liverpool, called 'Pain Control', here.

Poems by Peter Robinson
My Italy
Unwitting Epitaph

Links
You can visit Peter Robinson's website here.

You can read an interview with Peter Robinson on the
Poetry Kit website here.

Another interview with Peter, from Signals magazine, is here.

Salt will be publishing a Companion to Peter Robinson's work later this year. More details are here.

Shearsman Books will be publishing a series of interviews with Peter Robinson later this year. More details are here.

There is an entry for Peter Robinson on Wikipedia here.

Praise for Peter Robinson:
'Robinson is technically adept... his sound patterning binds the poems, but unobtrusively, while his sense of rhythm controls perceptions, and paces and spaces them out with uncanny skill. His language is always precise, and maintains that precision in the service of the vaguest and most fleeting sensations. The book is full of perfectly formed expressions of the half-formed, of sharply delineated renderings of the most blurred and intermediate of terrains...
Robinson is an original poet.'
- Patrick McGuinness, Poetry Review

'To read Peter Robinson attentively is to gain an exact and exacting sense of what the world is now.'
- James Sutherland-Smith, PN Review

'We need this kind of poetry.'
- Kate Price, The Reader