Hill of doors - Robin Robertson

Charged with strangeness and beauty, Hill of Doors is a haunted and haunting book, where each successive poem seems a shape conjured from the shadows, and where the uncanny is made physically present. The collection sees the return of some familiar members of the Robertson company, including Strindberg - heading, as usual, towards calamity - and the shape-shifter Dionysus. Four loose retellings of stories of the Greek god form pillars for the book, alongside four short Ovid versions. Threaded through these are a series of pieces about the poet's childhood on the north-east coast, his fascination with the sea and the islands of Scotland. However, the reader will also discover a distinct new note in Robertson's austere but ravishing poetry: towards the possibility of contentment - a house, a door, a key - finding, at last, a 'happiness of the hand and heart'. Magisterial in its command and range, indelibly moving and memorable in its speech, Hill of Doors is Robin Robertson's most powerful book to date.

Robin Robertson is from the north-east coast of Scotland. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has published six books of poetry and received a number of accolades, including the Petrarca-Preis, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and all three Forward Prizes. His selected poems, Sailing the Forest, came out in 2014. The Long Take won the 2018 Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.