'George Seurat on the Vernal Equinox, 1891' is Floyd Skloot's 'portrait of the artist as a young man at the point of death.' Its measured coolness, understated, even regimented movement and diction put the reader in the place of 'viewer', composer of the 'portrait':

'In the pointillist painting of George Seurat
the precise placement of dots of pure color
forces a viewer's eyes to mix them much as
paint on a palette, thereby demonstrating
art's truly mutual nature.'

     It is one of many poems in Floyd Skloot's remarkable second collection that celebrates the ways in which art might rescue and retrieve things from life. In the best of them we are well aware of 'art's truly mutual nature,' jobs to be done by the reader as well as the writer, if fragile securities of shared artistic inheritance are not to be jeopardised. They are not best termed `confessional', even though the subject matter (patterns of illness and recovery, everyday rhythms of love and caring and observation) is recognisably intimate. They evoke and issue from the 'hiding places of our power', but they invariably manage to include the reader in the deal. As with other great poets of memory from Wordsworth through Eliot to Lowell, Skloot evokes the importance of remembered 'things' ('Each is in its place, each has its function, its history, its drama' as Lowell puts it in '91, Revere Street' ) that have somehow persisted 'rock-like' despite the 'blank be-fogging of forgetfulness'. The 'mutual' nature of such an art is two-fold: to be honest to the sources and process of remembering and, in so doing, to admit the limitations of linguistic equivalents for the process as well as their enabling means of access.

     Pretty near the centre of the collection's five parts is 'Memory Harbor', a fine poem that takes issue with, and re-defines in its own progress, the chosen epigraph from Jack B. Yeats ('No one creates. The artist assembles memories.'). In its questioned inconsistencies, the false starts on a 'poetic' journey from its chosen signifiers for memory ('when the past comes into view/ like a harbour') the imagery of sea and setting sun and father, as pilot, and mother, caught in the window 'of a shack', is poignantly and shakingly reshuffled for the reader. The movement is dialectical, but the uncertainty, the irresolution of the third and last stanza as it picks up the imagery again makes the reader return to the beginning to check again. From this:

'I no longer know what to trust
when the past comes into view
like a harbor and the boat
my father pilots begins to swing
in one great arc towards the sea.'

To this:

'I no longer know where to turn
when loss like a gust of wind
swings me back again to open sea
where the sun that I knew as a smooth
disk rising behind me grows edges
now as it sets and glows coral
and bittersweet, glows crimson
and scarlet in the moment it sinks
below the shimmering horizon.'

     Hints of Tennyson ('Crossing the Bar') and Eliot ('The Burial of the Dead') are swung back in the fuller realisation of 'turning' and the 'edges' that the sun has 'grown': the synthesis of colour and light is especially telling given the subject matter of other poems that surround this one. The next poem, 'Evening Song', begins with the image of a last 'flare of daylight' (distress signal?) as the sun sinks; the mother-figure's years of slow blindness and encroaching dementia are given comparable images of contraction ('drawing the world into her corner room/beside the sea') and light going ('the past an empty theater gone/dark the moment she arrives') with the beautifully enjambed flicker 'gone/dark' before the last line's stark 'I am no longer in my mother's mind' (with the subtexts that she is no longer in her 'right mind' and that his existence, as her memory of him, has been elided). Before 'Memory Harbor' we have already had the sonnet 'Bittersweet Nightshade' that plays on all senses of its titlewords in the poem's close observation of the plant's physical qualities and metaphorical equivalents. The sestet ends:

     'I love to see these blue stars.
Their five points bend back to reveal a blunt
golden cone nestled in the heart of leaf
when in this light long shadows run like tears.
The wide yellow berries starting to run
toward red are the exact color of grief.'

     The plainness of the diction, the constraint of the chosen form, the hints and echoes in half-rhymes allow the 'exact color of grief' to escape triteness and to reverberate with its achieved emotional connotations. And this happens again and again: there are too many good poems to mention, but their cumulative power and their interdependent nestlings and shadowings lead to a broadening and deepening debate about perception that fastens onto the reader's powers of concentration, abilities to make memorial links. Illness, the lives of the artists, potential for renewal and self-re-discovery in the face of oblivion, love: these are the big themes here, but a skim read or a summary does the collection no justice. Outstanding discrete poems (my favourites include 'Seurat on the Vernal Equinox,' 'A Change of Weather,' 'Critical Care,' 'Visiting Hour' and 'Leakage') live by themselves well enough but are improved by their contexts; they throw light upon one another, with the quality of 'light' a central metaphor for how we try to record our lives: the poem 'Gem' is indicative of Skloot's gathered power:

'Her thumb strokes
the stone's sharp pavilion,
the crown, the star
and bezel facets
as though soaking
up their brilliance.'

     Peter Robinson's excellent About Time Tooindicates from its title's embroiled pun and the chastising huffiness of the 'hurry up' caught its idiom that the attritions of time are both subject matter and a manner of speaking. The collection is also concerned with defining 'home' from Japanese, Italian and English perspectives: all of these landscapes are part of a complex pattern of leave-taking and home-building. At the heart of the collection is the 'Via Sauro Variations', a twenty five part sequence 'centred' around Robinson's partner's old flat (in Via Nazario Sauro, Parma) that re-works contexts and phrases from poems familiar to readers of Robinson's work from This Other Life (1988) onwards. Such a process of retrieval and re-appropriation flickers at the heart of things; seeming familiarities are revised and defamiliarised in their new homes. In this we are reminded of his work as translator, especially of Vittorio Sereni's poetry, both for its technical delicacy and sensitivity, and an extended sense of translation that embraces the poet's own physical and metaphysical 'presences'( as father, husband, revenant, visitor, exile). Robinson's place is at the edge, evoking 'possibilities/ hidden in years' silences' ('Via Sauro Variations',10), the fleeting glimpses of past selves in states of suspended re-evaluation. His process is akin to Joyce's modernist notions of 'epiphany'and his adopted 'style indirect libre'. Robinson's 'spots of time' are part of a series of 'realisations' rising from idiomatic deadenings towards new understandings. Gabriel Conroy in 'The Dead' comes to mind:

'a mirror speckled at its edges
contains me a moment, the ghost
of years ago who loved and lost
and gained dependents by slow stages' ('Via Sauro,' 24)

     Here the skill of the half-rhymes and the syntactical suspensions allow the potential melodramas of 'loved and lost' ('better to have... than never to have loved at all') to remain as something half-said. Robinson is a master of such a 'light touch'; his hearing is akin to the equivalents of the light and shade he uses to register states of emotional attachment, re-animation and dissociation. His poems are `on the outskirts' or on the point of proceeding through the 'customs' declaration of previous emotional states with all the baggage of the present. They are traveller's tales, not quite exchanging one world for another (adult imaginations of a child's world, re-visiting domains of courtships and settlings) but synthesising the two; enmeshed socio-political contexts (James Bulger's murder, a 'district in my home town/where a child's battered body had been found', or the Balkans conflict with 'news of survivors in a shelled city') are hinterlands or sidings glimpsed en route. Robinson acknowledges the gifts of such journeys in a wider realisation that any 'repeated'act can never be quite the same as the original. The collection's chosen epigraph from Byron's letters ('No answer from you yet--perhaps it is as well--but do recollect--that all is at stake--the present--the future--& even the colouring of the past...') is obviously important to Robinson not just for the many notions of 'colouring' but also for the fraught expectancy of a reply and the anticipation that all might topple, not just time present and future, but the possibilities of a re-written past, given the wrong words. A characteristic tone of Robinson's, rueful cautiousness, is rendered in a dappling effect: shades of meaning are held up for examination in shades of light ('outskirts flecked with sun and shade...', characters 'grazed by light,' 'frost patches where the sun doesn't reach...'), and allusive shades of other poetic moments (a twist on Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' in 'Difficult Mornings', a turn on Marlowe's 'Come live with me...' in the final section of the 'Via Sauro Variations') and many other re-worked echoes, as in Yeatsian 'bundle of accidents' and brawling sparrows. Analogies from other media that come to mind include Arvo Part's sequences (as in 'Fur Alina') and the art of Paul Klee; if we add Roy Fisher, Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and John Peck as other major examples we start to sense Robinson's plurality of resonance.

     Although his poems explore ways out of the past, the evocation of its hidden presence is often most lastingly memorable in his work. 'Scargill House' is one of his most moving poems to date: the sequence working through a Hardyesque tragic irony of retrospection to place the characters, including Robinson and his first wife, among time's laughing stocks; the cunningly re-wound 'familiar turns' of the poem's journeyings rounded upon in the last section's unsentimental final blazon:

'But that night, further North
as we fronted blazing skies
above the Yorkshire Moors,
neither of us foresaw
that we would reach an end
so flaming and definitive
there'd be no making amends,
no shared past to restore.'

     Many of Robinson's best and most intriguing individual poems ('The Gift', 'Dream Report', 'Same World' and 'Your Other Country' ) are arranged in three parts, playing with a dialectical argument. All three parts re-define and reverberate with re-reading, as in the excellent 'Something to Declare' where the question 'all casual like' of where 'we'd come from' to the stragglers 'Last off the flight out of Amsterdam' takes Robinson through the response 'nothing to declare' that finishes the first stanza into the 'except that....' of the second and the 'But...mostly' of the third. The dreamscape of 'ghosts of Burtonwood aerodrome,'/ a closed asylum's crenellations, /flashes, grassed heaps, road signs...' in the second stanza is in turn 'overtaken' by a stanza that most typifies, for this reader, the brilliant intricacies of some of Robinson's central textures, strategies and concerns:

'But mostly it was agitated leaves
flapping at reflections on a window pane,
or late June light that lingers
over heaped cumulus after rain;
like a conversation, rudely interrupted,
they come through with an answer
drawing out what it is to be
in this home again.'

Both Robinson and Skloot have produced collections that seek to 'share' the past, that leave spaces and challenges for the reader in art's 'truly mutual nature' to reach their own conclusions about where they are in the text and thereby 'what it is to be/ in this home again.'