Every Little Sound: (Pavilion Poetry)

Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the 2016 T S Eliot Prize for Best Collection. Drawing from neuroscience on the idea of 'internal gain', an internal volume control which helps us amplify and focus on quiet sounds in times of threat, danger or intense concentration, Ruby Robinson's brilliant debut introduces a poet whose work is governed by a scrupulous attention to the detail of the contemporary world. Moving and original, her poems invite us to listen carefully, and use ideas of hearing and listening to explore the legacies of trauma. The book celebrates the separateness and connectedness of human experience in relationships, and our capacity to harm and love.

Table of Contents:
Reader, listener, UnlocatableLongbeforeHopeUndressListenStoryTruthLocked DoorsMy MotherApologyInterlude Tea Time Romance Boy This Night Orgasm Schism Watching TV Internal Gain Breathe Deep Hush Love Love II Flashback How to Catch a Pebble Winter Past Talisker Bay Tuning Fork To my Family Notes and Acknowledgements

About the Author :
Ruby Robinson was born in Manchester in 1985 and lives in Sheffield. She studied English Literature at the University of East Anglia and has an MA from Sheffield Hallam University where she also won the Ictus Prize for poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry (Chicago) and elsewhere.

Review :
The most vital poetry is fuelled by truth, even when it may expose us to the source of pain. Ruby Robinson's poems enact this risk with great skill, reaffirming the power of the art. Every Little Sound is an extraordinary first collection from a very gifted young poet. Robinson is concerned with 'the gaps between - when sets are dismantled and rebuilt, or a tortoise hibernates while all human life continues around it. In poems that pulse with sensory detail - the sun pushing through iced air, a horizon 'enflaming' the shallows at the water's edge - her poetry amplifies the quietest, habitually unheard, sounds of our lives. There is a metaphysical sensibility - at work in poems like the wonderful 'Undress' - a modern take on the resistant lover trope, but with a delicious twist: while Donne and Marvell stop short of a resolution, Robinson's fictional lover is marvellously yielding. Her crisp phrasing and relentless reaching after the truth make hers a rare and powerful new voice. Ruby Robinson is one to watch. Ruby Robinson is a real find. Her agile and poised poems play with scale, listen out and in, and crank the gain up on the world. It's great to discover such an exciting debut. To read 'Apology' in full is to be within the experience of the speaker. In part because of the hardness of language, clinical at times, the poem, and the collection, is irreparably moving. Several ventures into prose and long-narrative confessional poetry punctuate the collection...and are stunning precisely on account of their grace and restraint. These are taut, vibrant, intimate poems, structured in a such a way as to replicate the complicated manoeuvres our brains make as we try to understand human behaviour. Robinson retains/regains an artistic distance that augurs well for future collections... From the outset, we are forewarned - there is nothing so personal that it cannot be expressed here. Robinson brings to light the unspoken connection between reader and poet, and even in the darkest of lines, empathy arises. Every Little Sound had the most profound impact on me An intelligent and disturbing debut that explores how family affects both our sense of self and our intimate relationships. Composed of free verse and occasional prose poems, it is stylistically original in its diction and syntax as speaker and poet grapple to render experience. There are too many examples of good poetry in this book for any review outside of a monograph to do it justice. Perhaps all that needs to be said is that this is a serious arrival of a poet that I would view to be among our absolute best.