Robin Thomas

The Dolls’ House Maker’s Room sits in a house of tools and memories, the tools as much metaphors as objects, the memories laden with objects and images, with the places and events that shape what we know and what we don’t. A maven of gentle surprise, Robin Thomas’ language is supple, generous and deeply reflective; his observations sharp, quick-witted and beautifully controlled. There is a signature breadth of reference in these poems — travel, film, the absurdities of life and human history, art, mortality, loss — united by a confident, distinctive, humane voice. bats foxes planes clouds lives made and unmade revolutions tea and cake a stately moon eternal stars I wake. It’s day. You’re still not here. (from ‘Wake’)

Kant and marmalade, a solemn talk with a lift, an existential struggle with something from IKEA, an absurdist discussion of meaning in poetry, or a disquisition on the nature of windows: Robin Thomas is a poet of high imagination, always looking for the unusual angle and finding it over and over in this, his latest collection.Giant Crabs and Spiders ranges across philosophy, painting, music, literature, politics, history, science, and what it’s like to be alive. The poet explores knowledge, ethics, meaning, mortality, and writes of loss and grief. Bubbling away through these intense, sometimes quirky, always compassionate poems is a joy in language, its musical resources and endless possibilities.