Abstract/Summary

Ravishing Europa, the poet’s eleventh collection, marks a wholly unexpected development, prompted, as is evident throughout, by the fissures exported from a political party to an entire country, and beyond, by the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union. Its consequences cast crucial events for this poet, both personal and public, into unforeseen fresh lights. Prompted by a televised debate to wonder in the title poem upon what impulse the founding European myth is based, Robinson’s new poems search through his individual and cultural memory to offer, as the book unfolds, an answer.