Pairs

About the Book

Call them what you will - two-liners, couplets, distichs. Pairs is a small book of          very small poems. There are - who was counting in the doing - one hundred and eleven of them. A pair, that is, two lines, are enough; “Where’s the rest?” doesn’t get asked. The poems provide diversity too. One may be close to an aphorism, another is a lyric yelp, and yet another a see-saw of observation and assessment. Taken as a group, and singly at times, the poems can be by turns anguished, exultant, contemplative, laughing..

The form of two-line verse has a history going back at least to the Greeks, who could be pithy indeed. (These now are less than Greek, though a god or two does pass through.)  With so few words, to seek to separate content from form really does seem futile. A directness results. Have a look:

About the Author

Blake Robinson was born in Massachusetts and has lived in Africa, Asia, and Europe as well as America. He now shunts between Washington, D.C. and Miami, Florida. A poet and translator, his work has appeared in The Nation, Chelsea, Exquisite Corpse, and elsewhere. Carcanet Press in the U.K. brought out his Remember Me, God of Love, an anthology of the great 20th century Italian gay poet Sandro Penna’s poetry and prose, and Ohio University Press Between Sea and Sahara, about Algeria during its colonization, by 19th century French painter-writer Eugène Fromentin. Upcoming is the translation of Italian jack-of-the-arts Alberto Savinio’s Paris Then. Pairs is the first book of his poems.