Robertson's sweeping poetry packed into tiny package

“The Wrecking Light” by Robin Robertson (Mariner Books, 97 pgs., $13.95)

Robin Robertson is caught between worlds — between the London in which he lives and an epic past evoked by longboats and bonfires and where myths, not science, explain the cosmos. His 2006 collection “Swithering” actively moved between both just as that interesting word — a Scottish one referring not only to agitation but also to vacillation — announced on the book’s cover.

And in “The Wrecking Light,” that tendency to swither remains as the poet moves between homages to Ovid and others and moody glimpses of himself (“How long ago,” he asks in “Easter, Liguria,” “did I notice that the light was wrong,/ that something inside me was broken?”).

One of the collection’s centerpieces is “Leaving St. Kilda,” written in that full-blown rhetoric of epic adventure that you might find in a translation of “The Iliad” about a tiny island beyond the Outer Hebrides. Small as it is, Robertson invests its entire landscape, the place names and landmark names, with a magic that’s clearly in the spirit of Tolkien or George R.R. Martin.

Elsewhere in this somber, beautiful collection, Robertson preserves fleeting moments of insight as his speakers confront the passing of time — how, for instance, in “Landfall,” the “crates that once held herring,/ freshly dead, now hold distance, nothing but the names/ of the places I came from, years ago.”