The Heartless Traffic - Jeremy Robson

After breaking a thirty-five year writer's block with two books in quick succession, Jeremy Robson selects the best of his poems from a long life in poetry, including his first books from the early 1960s, his recent collections Blues in the Park and Subject Matters and some fifty new poems. The Heartless Traffic is a book about childhood haunts, Jewish roots, youthful passions and the rumbling of war; about nights in Soho, Venice, Paris and Rome, the mysteries of Cairo and the alleyways of Jerusalem; and about some of the artists Robson was close to over the years, including Vernon Scannell, Alfred Brendel, Michael Garrick, Ron Moody and Dannie Abse. Witty and fond, original and compelling, The Heartless Traffic is a book about change and regret, politics and jazz, love and loss, as Robson looks at a world under threat and listens to the 'the heartless traffic / in its endless race to God knows where.'