Anna Robinson"s first full collection, "The Finders of London", introduces a compelling new voice in poetry. Her poems, set in and around the centre of London, depict a capital both familiar and alien, peopled with figures contemporary and historical: from the residents of present-day Lambeth, to the victims of Jack the Ripper, and to those whose spirits are still embedded in the reflections of a plate-glass office window, in the earth beneath the author"s feet, or in the flotsam washed up on the Thames beach. It"s these working-class voices that lend strength to Robinson"s own, and with it she mythologizes, catalogues and searches for the anima and animus of this multi-natured city. The river Thames is never far away, its foreshore the setting for the long poem that provides the book"s title: "The Finders of London", part-chronicle, part-modern fairytale, caked in mud, it challenges the morality of its Victorian counterparts while telling a simple and elegant tale of the toshers and the river they live and work under.
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