After
breaking a thirty-five year writer?s block with two books in quick succession, Jeremy Robson selects the best of his poems from a long life
in poetry, including his first books from the early 1960s, his recent
collections Blues in the Park and Subject Matters and some fifty
new poems. The Heartless Traffic is a book about childhood haunts, Jewish
roots, youthful passions and the rumbling of war; about nights in Soho, Venice,
Paris and Rome, the mysteries of Cairo and the alleyways of Jerusalem; and
about some of the artists Robson was close to over the years, including Vernon
Scannell, Alfred Brendel, Michael Garrick, Ron Moody and Dannie Abse. Witty and
fond, original and compelling, The Heartless Traffic is a book about
change and regret, politics and jazz, love and loss, as Robson looks at a world
under threat and listens to the ?the heartless traffic / in its endless race to
God knows where.?