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Sitters
by Tony Roberts
Sitters, Tony Roberts' second collection of poetry, is a portrait gallery of well-known and lesser-known figures form the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Among the wide range of artists (and their models) whose voices we hear are Degas, Munch, the Bonnards and Henry James, all under the presiding 'lens' of the fashionable Victorian portrait painter John Singer Sargent. But hung between the larger canvasses there are also intimate snapshots of the poet's own family and friends whose voice have a different resonance.
These poems attempt to liberate both the sitter and artist from the finished image, to give them back their voices. Sitters is about identity, and love — romantic, filial and the love of friends — and, as such, this collection is a celebration of both.
...has a wonderful ear for speech patterns... at home with the dramatic monologue... A book full of intriguing, accomplished poems.
Tony Roberts has an acute sense of the tender damage wrought by time, and of the specifics through which it is best understood. His explorations in these poems insist, warily but firmly, on going the extra mile, and the insistence pays off.
[Roberts'] historical investigations are powerfully inhabited and keenly felt... and all his poems enact real warmth and delighted interest.
Paperback
54 pages
ISBN 1 900072 92 0
Published January 2002
