Robert Seatter’s extensive knowledge of history and culture is reflected in his writing, which is rich in allusion. In the title poem of the collection ‘My Lover as Houdini’, Seatter invokes the escapologist and illusionist Harry Houdini to evoke the loss and grief of a lover. The language is simple and confessional, carrying a strong visual sense of desperation. The city, with reference to the River Thames, looms in the background against which this loss is experienced, and in phrases such as “shaking water like diamonds off his coat,” there is an Eliotesque use of juxtaposition. Carol Ann Duffy describes the collection as a “heartbreaking account of vanished love”, and Jean Sprackland describes Seatter's writing as possessing a “timeless, clear-eyed recognition of what really matters”.

The poem ‘On Re-seeing Jules et Jim’, referring to the 1962 French New Wave film Jules et Jim directed by François Truffaut, exemplifies this quality. With melancholia as its central mood, Seatter’s poem draws on the evocative experience of rewatching a film. It “forces tears”… “against passing trains, clouds, a river,” and the city is again rendered as a witness to remembrance and loss.

This sense of loss is further developed in the poem ‘I Come From’, in which Seatter writes of his suburban hometown with a tone of nostalgia. The poet’s shift in environment—from pastoral innocence to a metropolitan life of “smashed windows, graffiti, fog on the platform, skinheads and fights”—contrasts sharply with the place he comes from, which carries a quiet, underlying trauma suggestive of silence. Seatter’s imagery of “clean handkerchiefs” and “kindness” functions like photographs removed from their original context, subtly alluding to abuse and prompting this movement away. The poem itself is marked by a double-edged nostalgia, expressing both a profound sense of humanity, “of what really matters”, while its use of juxtaposition and fragmented imagery gestures towards an objective correlative.