Anna Robinson - Böcker

Anna Robinson's first full collection, "The Finders of London", introduces a compelling new voice in poetry. Her poems, set in and around the centre of London, depict a capital both familiar and alien, peopled with figures contemporary and historical: from the residents of present-day Lambeth, to the victims of Jack the Ripper, and to those whose spirits are still embedded in the reflections of a plate-glass office window, in the earth beneath the author's feet, or in the flotsam washed up on the Thames beach. It's these working-class voices that lend strength to Robinson's own, and with it she mythologizes, catalogues and searches for the anima and animus of this multi-natured city. The river Thames is never far away, its foreshore the setting for the long poem that provides the book's title: "The Finders of London", part-chronicle, part-modern fairytale, caked in mud, it challenges the morality of its Victorian counterparts while telling a simple and elegant tale of the toshers and the river they live and work under.

Into the Woods takes us to imaginary wild woodland in the centre of London. In this story the woodsman, the wild girl and the widow Mary live in a recognisable present, but being archetypes, they continually try to emerge from our time into one that may never have been - to the Lambeth woods. We too are drawn into our own fantasies of wild woods from folk tales, and here real-life images of Epping Forest and Box Hill fuel our imagination and work to plunge us, resisting, into the centre of the woods, into heterotopia. In the end though, we emerge back to the familiar, and the widow Mary snaps us back to reality when she purchases an acre of woodland from the Archbishop of Canterbury, signaling the end of the wild wood. The second book from Anna Robinson builds upon her acclaimed debut The Finders of London, leading us further into a London that we have never seen