Approach to Distance

Peter Robinson (1953– ) is among Britain’s internationally recognized contemporary poets. He has also had a long and deep relationship with Japan, the country where he would spend eighteen years teaching English literature in Sendai and Kyoto. Approach to Distance: Selected Poems from Japan presents a bilingual gathering of the poems he wrote during his residence in the country, a key period in his creative life. Miki Iwata’s introduction sets the choice of poems in context, and her translations bring over into Japanese the emotional intelligence, trans-cultural understanding, and wit-inflected feeling that characterize this poet’s widely appreciated work.

‘It’s as if he carries a listening device, alert for the moments when the tectonic plates of mental experience slide quietly one beneath another to create paradoxes and complexities that call for poems to be made’ – Roy Fisher

‘… a major English poet’ – Poetry Review

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