Grimoire
with drawings by Tim Robertson
screenprints and original drawings available from timrobertsonart.squarespace.com
Picador, 2020
‘I’ve long admired Robin Robertson’s narrative gift… If you love stories, you will love this book.’
Val McDermid
‘Superb… Robin Robertson’s spirit-haunted Grimoire: New Scottish Folk Tales demonstrates how much poetry matters even in the most terrible of times.’
John Banville, Irish Times, Best Books of 2020
‘Robin Robertson’s Grimoire – ‘a handbook for invoking spirits’ – taps into something ancient, like all the best stories. In this beautifully spare and distilled poetic form, however, these new Scottish folk tales rise from the page like the supernatural beings they give rise to, and stay with you because they seem to come from inside, or from the edge of a dream, or a childhood story you don’t quite remember but can’t shake off. They are disconcerting and weirdly exciting, because they don’t moralise, compromise or explain.
This new collection, by a poet/storyteller of extraordinary imagination and insight, is unflinching, brutal and often movingly beautiful… a gorgeous book to handle and treasure.’
Pamela Beasant, Tablet
‘Magic and malign forces weave eerily through this slim volume of “New Scottish Folk Tales” by the distinguished poet, whose 2018 verse-novel, The Long Take, was Booker-shortlisted. Here, he deploys Scots, Gaelic and English, distilling the spirit of vanished peoples who spoke freely of the selkies, changelings and shapeshifters that populate these beautiful poems… The perfect fireside companion for winter nights.’
Herald
‘This is a book that will make you awaken at night… Robertson does something exceptionally impressive with language here, in that the book twists around Gaelic, Scots and English. It does not feel forced… it is the ease of the switching that is remarkable.
The linguistic inventiveness would mean little or nothing if it did not come with an emotional truth. Robertson doesn’t coax, but he does lure the reader, right up to the point when you are punched in the guts. There is a precision in this from which younger poets might learn.’
Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
‘Robertson masterfully commands re-invoked traditional tales as present and persistent stories… Whether you read for the magic of the story, for the lull of beautiful language, or for the mysteries of the occult, Grimoire is a must-have for your poetry shelf this autumn.’
Beth Cochrane, The Skinny
‘This is a remarkable book, the riches of which I can only touch on here. It is, in its essence, unlike almost anything else in the poetry written in these islands in recent years. It is at the opposite pole to that anecdotal poetry of personal experience and memory which still abounds. It does not tell the stories of myths and folktale, so much as re-live and re-imagine them. An added attraction is that the book, in terms both of text and drawings, is beautifully produced.’
Glyn Pursglove, Acumen