Thank you so much to everyone at the M.O.D and the RAF and to all who have kindly supported my writing.
Bookshelf
Reviews from the strange, heartfelt and impossible worlds of Benjamin Arthur Robinson.
Alas the Day
★★★★☆4/5
An expansive, emotionally exposed collection that treats grief, love, faith and endurance as lived experiences rather than tidy themes. Its strongest passages have the directness of a private confession suddenly made public, and the recurring images give the book a cumulative weight. The sheer abundance can make some sections feel repetitive, but that excess is also part of its character: this is writing that would rather risk saying too much than retreat into polish. Uneven, deeply sincere and often affecting.
A darker and more ambitious work, preoccupied with memory, damaged humanity and the fear of becoming estranged from ourselves. The book is strongest when its speculative ideas remain anchored to recognisable emotion; those moments give the larger vision real force. At times the intensity is relentless and a little more restraint would sharpen the impact, but the atmosphere lingers. A bleak, searching book with genuine imaginative reach.
This collection builds its effect through emotional weather: coldness, distance, recollection and the uneasy knowledge that ordinary days can carry private catastrophes. The plainspoken voice is accessible and occasionally striking in its refusal to decorate pain. Some pieces circle familiar ideas more than they develop them, yet the best poems find memorable images inside everyday sadness. A sombre, readable collection whose honesty is its main strength.
The sea becomes both destination and emotional instrument in a collection concerned with escape, memory, longing and return. There is an attractive openness to the writing, and the strongest pieces use landscape to enlarge intimate feelings without losing their human scale. A few passages explain emotions that the imagery has already conveyed, but the book's sincerity and sense of movement carry it. Reflective, melancholy and often quietly beautiful.
A lively, eccentric book driven by personality. Salomina is the sort of figure who can hold together comedy, tenderness and absurdity simply by occupying the page, and the writing is at its best when it trusts that strange energy. The tonal shifts can be abrupt, and readers wanting conventional realism may find the world unruly, but neatness would diminish its charm. A distinctive character piece with humour, affection and a welcome streak of oddness.
Isolation is the obvious subject, but the more interesting achievement is the way the book turns being stranded into a test of identity, memory and absurd human persistence. The atmosphere is convincing and there are flashes of dark humour that stop the material becoming oppressive. Some transitions are rough and the pacing is not always even, yet the central predicament has genuine pull. An imaginative, lonely and surprisingly humane work.
