Pacts and Conjurations

Robin Hamilton was born in Ayrshire in 1947 and moved at an early age to Glasgow, where he spent his formative years. He became one of a powerful group of writers, including Liz Lochead, Tom Leonard, Aonghas MacNeacail, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Stephen Mulrine, who emerged there in the middle sixties. In the mid-seventies, Robin was the recipient of an Eric Gregory award. Formerly a lecturer at Loughborough University, he took early retirement and still lives in Loughborough surrounded by his books. He also has a bonsai, and ex-wife and two grown-up children.

Robin is a vital and disturbing love poet and a bitter analyst of the human condition, at once accessible and demanding but with a leavening of subtle wit.

This collection brings together most of his work from 1982 onwards and also a few poems from his previous book: The Lost Jockey: Collected Poems 1966-1982 published by The Hunting Raven Press / Bran's Head Books in 1985. Robin has been widely published in magazines and small press pamphlets in both Britain and the U.S.A.