Interview: Robin Robertson, catalyst for much of Scotland's literary renaissance in the 1990s, comes to Ireland next month for the Poetry Now festival in Dún Laoghaire. He talks to Louise East
As poets go, Robin Robertson is clearly not of the ivory tower variety. A critically-acclaimed, prize-winning poet who makes his first appearance at Dún Laoghaire's Poetry Now festival next month, Robertson was also the first editor to seize upon the talents of such writers as Irvine Welsh, AL Kennedy and Alan Warner, and thus is often credited with single-handedly kick-starting Scotland's literary renaissance in the 1990s.
This dual existence finds its physical manifestation in his offices at Jonathan Cape, where he is currently deputy publishing director. Amid the photocopied spreadsheets and the stacks of proofs, there sits the skull and antlers of a red deer, bleached and picked clean, a photograph of James Joyce, and the fixings for a decent Bloody Mary.
Robertson's latest collection, Swithering, which was shortlisted for the 2006 TS Eliot Award even before its publication this month, is full of shape-shifting and dichotomies. There are selkies and ghosts, there's Actaeon, transformed into a stag, Proteus, the evasive sea god and the playwright Strindberg mooching from city to city. Then too, there are the shifts from love to loss, from ghost to guest, from snow to thaw-water and most poignantly, from childhood to not-childhood.
Even the Scots word it takes for its title can mean two things: to be uncertain, and to appear in shifting form, indeterminate and volatile.
"The title announced itself fairly early on in the process," explains Robertson. "It earned its keep because this collection is largely about flux and great change. Many of the characters in this book are going through extreme metamorphoses . . . My last book, Slow Air, was firmly about stasis whereas this one is about moving, perhaps a little uncomfortably in places."
Born in Scone, Scotland in 1955, Robertson moved to Aberdeen when his father, a Church of Scotland minister, became chaplain of the university there. The "implacable, cold, wet, stony nature" of Aberdeen still makes its presence felt in Robertson's nature-soaked imagery, while the musicality of his verse owes much to the Scots he heard around him and "the pipe music, the pibroch, a music that, like the cry of the seagull, one is always trying to capture in poetry".
Unusually for an avowedly non-believing son of a Protestant minister, the poet Robertson returns to most is David Jones, the Anglo-Welsh poet and painter whose work is wholly informed by Catholic liturgy. Or perhaps it's not so uncanny; Robertson himself suggests he took cadence if not creed from his father's weekly readings of the Old Testament, while the ancient classics and the early work of Geoffrey Hill also played their part
After university in Aberdeen and a post-grad in Canada he joined Penguin, serving a seven-year apprenticeship there before joining Secker & Warburg in London. Initially reluctant to publish Scottish authors ("not Scots for Scots sake"), he grew increasingly aware of "an identifiable renaissance, an efflorescence in Scottish writing" in the early 1990s. He scoured the magazines and pamphlets distributed, "like samizdat", north of the border, and signed up Welsh, Kennedy, Warner, Janice Galloway and Duncan McClean.
'THERE WAS AN almost amateurish feel to it. We were all working together for the common good of what we perceived to be important ground-breaking cultural events in the shape of these books." As for why such a flowering occurred, Robertson points to Thatcher's reign: "I think it was largely political, although the writers might disagree. Scotland was known as a dumping ground for anthrax and poll tax; the place the English experiment on. After a while, that builds up a fair head of steam."
Perhaps his most famous signing was Welsh's Trainspotting, of which he printed 3000 and despaired of selling any. "I remember Irvine and I tried to cook up some sort of plan where I'd write anonymous letters to The Scotsman complaining about this piece of filth in order to get a bit of publicity."
WHILE ROBERTSON RELISHES his current list, which includes all of his original roll-call of Scottish authors as well as several Irish authors including Michael Longley, Anne Enright, Eugene McCabe and Mike McCormack, he professes a great frustration with publishing. "There isn't that sense in publishing any more of a drive to find great work. Now it's about finding the right book for a gap in the market. What was exciting about that period was all these completely original minds doing things I'd never read before. That's what I want from publishing. I want art."
Robertson's years of service to that art has at times taken a toll on his own. He was 40 by the time he published his own first collection, A Painted Field, the work of 15 years. As the next, Slow Air took five and Swithering four, Robertson jokingly reckons it is mathematically probable he will eventually turn out a book a week at some point.
"I find it impossible to write in London so I go away to write . . . The first week is always detox; from the city, from the job, from all the writing that passes across my desk and through my head. That's very difficult to deal with; because I'm working as an editor of text, it takes me a long time to remove that aural pollution."
Although he claims to be wary of too much analysis of "the mysterious and occult process of writing a poem", Robertson is both humorous and eloquent on the subject.
"A phrase I just thought of links with something I wrote 20 years ago which has been orphaned and sitting in the back of a notebook. They just wave at each other and say 'hello' and suddenly, by that process of accretion, you've got the DNA of a poem. It's building around that that's very exciting. Without getting too New Age, too Yeatsian, there is a sort of a trance in which it feels that you are not entirely directing it, that the words are finding their own connections."
PERHAPS IT IS because he has signed no lease on the ivory tower that Robin Robertson, publisher-and-poet, is under no illusions as to the importance of poetry to much of society.
"If you take a dinner party in Dublin or London, it'll be perfectly acceptable for six educated, articulate men and women not to have read the new Simon Armitage or Paul Muldoon when it would not be acceptable for them to have no view on the new Ian McEwan or the new Brian Friel at the Abbey. Poetry has slipped out of the cultural agenda."
The usual whipping boy is education, but Robertson also points to the increasingly oblique nature of modern poetry.
"Poetry has become difficult as the century has become difficult. Yet to object to a poem being difficult seems to me extraordinary. No great art can be understood immediately. Art should provide sustenance and nutrition for a very long time. It can't be disposable. We live in a disposable age where everything offers immediate gratification and is instantly understood, and that, I suppose, is the real problem."
So what's the solution?
"I don't think the route is to give children rap, or performance poetry or song lyrics. I think they should just understand that poetry is a different way of speaking. It's a bit like a malt whiskey. It's not a pint of Harp," he smiles. "Poetry is concentrated and complex and takes a bit of getting used to."
Swithering, by Robert Robertson, is published by Picador (£8.99). He will read as part of the Poetry Now festival in Dún Laoghaire, Mar 23-26.
For full details, tel: 01-2054719 or see www.dlrcoco.ie/arts