Winner of The Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 A noir narrative written with the intensity & power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable
- & unclassifiable
- books of recent years. Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can`t return home to rural Nova Scotia, & looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity & repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles & San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but
- as those dark, classic movies made clear
- the country needed outsiders to study & dramatise its new anxieties. While Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties, riven by social & racial division, spiralling corruption & the collapse of the inner cities. The Long Take is about a good man, brutalised by war, haunted by violence & apparently doomed to return to it
- yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world & in himself. Watching beauty & disintegration through the lens of the film camera & the eye of the poet, Robin Robertson`s The Long Take is a work of thrilling originality.