Liverpool Accents: Seven Poets and a City

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996

As I wrote in the Preface 'The idea for this anthology came to me on a mountain in Japan. I was walking across the bridge above a gorge that separates where I live from where I work. Beautiful as the pine-covered slopes and rockfaces were, evocative as the city skyline in haze and the distant Pacific might be, I knew this was not where I belonged. Having come as far from Liverpool as it is possible to get on earth, it seemed high time, at least spiritually, to go back home.' The book offered the seven poets, Elaine Feinstein, Adrian Henri, Grevel Lindop, Jamie McKendrick, Deryn Rees-Jones, Matt Simpson, and myself, the opportunity to select a series of representative poems, such as my 'Plain Money', and to write an introduction to them which connected the life and work of the poet to the city. The cover is a futuristic mural of Liverpool by Adrian Henri called 'Esmedune 2000'. Most of the reviews were positive, and included a friendly one by 'KJ' in the TLS, which concluded: 'In Peter Robinson's poetry, the idea of "home" is properly problematic; his reticulation of the domestic and the industrial is both moving and stylistically intricate. In expressing a sense of unidentifiable loss, he speaks not only of his own exile but of the city's mislaid identity'.