Synopses & Reviews
Into the Woods takes us to imaginary wild woodland in the centre of London. In this story the woodsman, the wild girl and the widow Mary live in a recognisable present, but being archetypes, they continually try to emerge from our time into one that may never have been the Lambeth woods. We too are drawn into our own fantasies of wild woods from folk tales, and here real-life images of Epping Forest and Box Hill fuel our imagination and work to plunge us, resisting, into the centre of the woods, into heterotopia. In the end though, we emerge back to the familiar, and the widow Mary snaps us back to reality when she purchases an acre of woodland from the Archbishop of Canterbury, signalling the end of the wild wood.
About the Author
Anna Robinson was born and lives in London. She has an MA in Public History from Ruskin College, Oxford. Her pamphlet, Songs from the flats (Hearing Eye 2006), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. In 2001, she became the first recipient of The Poetry School Scholarship and her poetry was featured in the Schools second anthology, Entering the Tapestry, (Enitharmon 2003). Her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Poetry London, Magma, Brittle Star, the reater, In The Company of Poets (Hearing Eye 2003) and Oxford Poets 2007 (Oxford/Carcanet). As part of Poetry International and the South Bank Centre's Trading Places project, Robinson was Poet in Residence in Lower Marsh in 2006. A former tutor in prisons, she is a regular poetry judge for the Koestler Competition and is a founding editor for Not Shut Up! and the newly established Long Poem Magazine.