Publisher's Synopsis
In a review of Leaf Viewing for the London Review of Books, Nicholas Tredell wrote: 'these undemonstrative poems are interesting and effective. Robinson joins a line of expatriate poets which includes Empson and Enright. The challenges for such a poet are threefold: how to negotiate with cultural difference -- an especially complex problem today, when Eurocentrism has been strongly challenged; how to relate to the world he has left; and how to distinguish himself from his poetic predecessors. Robinson meets these challenges with tact and skill.'
'We know about "strong" poets,' John Ashbery said in PN Review. 'Attention must now be paid to the "curiously strong" like Peter Robinson.'
Peter Swaab in the TLS described as 'an eventful midlife, encompassing emigration to Japan, divorce, remarriage and major surgery.' This sums up well the book's thematic material, but, as Peter Carpenter noted in his review, 'the beauty of the poems is the impossibility of dissevering the personal and the public.' Lost and Found received a good handful of positive notices. James Keery in PN Review described it as my 'best collection, by a long chalk', adding that 'it rekindles interest in his previous work.' Alan Brownjohn in The Sunday Times found 'something genuinely powerful and disturbing' in the book and ended by praising the sequence about the brain tumour operation because it brought a 'talent for clear and startling imagery into play' which made the poems 'ring painfully true.'
