How I Learned to Sing

How I Learned to Sing is Mark Robinson's first collection this century. A senior job at the Arts Council meant that he did not send his poems out for over a decade, in case of potential conflicts of interest. Now he returns with a series of ambitious new poems alongside the best of his work from the last 25 years. How I Learned to Sing is a book about the industrial and cultural transformation of the North of England from the Miners Strike to the Big Society, about gain and loss and change, rootedness and flight, a series of bewildered elegies for people, times and places. Some poems argue with themselves, others with society or with other poets. Some attend to the domestic and the personal, some to the political and the public. Variously tender, angry, surreal and grave, keening, hollering, ranting, whispering and singing, Robinson is an allusive and richly entertaining writer, exploring how here and now make 'two halves of nowhere', and wondering why 'of many parallel worlds / I choose this one.'