There have been plenty of verse novels before Robin Robertson’s The Long Take – the form offers wonderful opportunities to those who can exploit its constraints and permissions. James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover was written using an ouija board, with WH Auden among those weighing in from the afterlife. Adam Foulds’s verse novella The Broken Word took the Mau Mau rising of the 1950s as its subject, while Philip Hancock’s Minding the Halo imagines the experiences of the young man assigned to look after Simon Templar’s car on the Côte d’Azur in 1978.
The Long Take is set in the US between 1946 and 1953, and above all in Los Angeles, at a time when the city’s downtown still offered some sort of refuge to marginal people. The hero, Walker, an ex-serviceman originally from Canada, makes friends with the otherwise friendless. This solidarity with the traumatised is the only intimacy he will allow himself, contaminated as he feels himself to be by cruelty, and not just other people’s. Robertson shows how much pain and ugliness a poetic line can absorb without the loss of technical control.
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