Jeffrey C. Robinson

...recently published Wordsworth Day by Day: Reading His Work into Poetry Now, published by Station Hill, a diary and original poetry about Wordsworth; and Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism, published by Palgrave Macmillan, a study of Romantic counter-poetics. He is currently completing an edition (co-edited with Jerome Rothenberg) of Poems for the Millennium, vol. 3: The University of California Book of Romantic and Post-romantic Poetry, due out in 2008. His 1989 book The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image will appear in a new paperback edition from Dalkey Archive Press later this year. Robinson teaches Romantic Poetry and Poetics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Excerpt from
Amenia, a Memoir—

A Dream

On the upper floor of The Maples in the front of the house over the front door and porch is a slender room like a Pullman car. It’s hardly a room at all but could be used for a long walk-through closet. It has a door at each end, one separating it from the master bedroom and the other simply entering onto a hallway. The windows in the room are small and high, like eyes look out to the front lawn, the field and across Leedsville Road to a cow pasture. I slept in this room, the forehead of the house.

In the dream, I am sleeping here when the door to the master bedroom opens and my grandfather—not Mel but my father’s father the Russian bald and white-mustachioed, walks slowly towards me, his face huge and round glowing like the full moon and grinning like a Jack-o-lantern. I am a child terrified rooted to my little bed in the forehead of the house.