Welcome to Robert Saxton’s poetry website

Robert Saxton is the author of nine books of poetry, including his latest collection Against Gravity (Two Rivers Press, May 2026), Flying School (Shearsman, 2019), and his version of Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Hours (The High Window Press, 2023; now available only from the author via the contact form).

His complete list of poetry publications:

• The Promise Clinic: His first poetry collection from Enitharmon, 1994.
• Manganese: From Carcanet/OxfordPoets – includes his first poems in the ‘triplet’ form, juxtaposing conventional and consonantal rhyme; and the prize-winning ‘The Nightingale Broadcasts’.
• Local Honey: From Carcanet/OxfordPoets – a collection exploring the blurred distinctions between sense and nonsense, heart and intellect, melancholy and zest.
• Hesiod’s Calendar: From Carcanet/OxfordPoets – a lively, colloquial version of Hesiod’s Theogony and Works & Days in 80 sonnets. Hesiod was arguably the first fully rounded personality in Western literature, and deserves to be better known.
• The China Shop Pictures: His first Shearsman title – includes a long comic demolition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and short sonnet sequences presenting highlights from Virgil’s Georgics.
• Six-way Mirror: A 30,000-word prose poem consisting of hundreds of vividly realised vignettes, loosely based on the I Ching. You can toss coins and use a table in the book to select hexagrams that determine your order of reading – or you can just read in the normal way.
• Flying School: Contains numerous poems on flight – reflecting an aspiration to come to terms with our hardest challenges, including the reality of death. The book includes elegies for the poet’s father, as well as poems about Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer musing on their art.
• Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours – A Version: From The High Window Press – a version of Rilke’s first poetic masterpiece, which offers surprises and frissons of all kinds as the poet explores the themes of God, pilgrimage, doubt, time, death and art. Saxton follows the rhyme patterns of the original German to capture a poetic conviction and precision that more literal versions often miss.
• Against Gravity: This new collection, despite its generally elegaic tone, also offers humour, mischief, play. There are elegies to the poet’s father, mother and friend as well as poems on the late Queen Elizabeth II, the annoyance of animated greetings cards, the Oxford (or serial) comma, the Hollywood Sign, and the challenges of making and using an index efficiently. The work concludes with a 68-stanza visit (in the voice of a 15-year-old Danish girl) to Vita Sackville-West’s famous garden at Sissinghurst, written as a birthday gift for a friend.

To find out more about these works and to purchase, please visit Robert Saxton’s Against Gravity and Earlier poetry collections pages.

Please use the Contact form if you would like to get in touch.