The Dolls’ House Maker’s Room – Robin Thomas
ISBN: 9781788641906
£10.99
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’)
Praise for The Dolls’ House Maker’s Room
I love the way Robin writes the suburban environment that traps and protects in equal measure, often with barely concealed derision, needle-sharp observation (‘Visitation’ and ‘Outlying District’) and yet in other poems, kindly affection for the ‘Britishness’ that infuses our attitudes (‘My Car’ made me smile.)
The anti-war poems (‘Conversations’, for example) bring the reader up short, confronting routine inhumanity by dogmatic institutions purporting to carry moral weight. ‘Whatever happened to question marks?’ the poet asks, in this world of loud-mouthed exclamations.
The ekphrastic poems and responses to other poets’ work in Part 2 develop the mood of ‘quiet desperation’ (I quote Henry David Thoreau) that we find in many of the poems in Part 1. A multimedia work of art is like ‘Death, if it is a thing/…made up of /strangely decorated fabrics,/ odd structures/ and models of what might be life’.
‘The Dolls’ House Maker’s Room’ is a collection that carries questions between its lines. The search for peace — an unobtainable peace at both a personal and a societal level — is a moving and immediately recognisable feature of life.
Janice Dempsey
Praise for Robin Thomas’s previous work
There is nothing fancy about the way Robin Thomas writes. He tells things in a straightforward way but with an eye for detail, for small and devastating surprises. This is not a poet who wants to stand out – yet stand out he does.
Louise Warren reviewing reminded of something in London Grip Poetry Review
Thomas’s unassuming humanitarianism and his unforced craftsmanship achieve a poignant symbiosis here. Reminded of Something is not a book to be dipped into, flipped through or accessed casually. It should be read as a whole, in sequence, ideally in a single sitting, and when the ten lines of ‘The News’ break upon the reader, the effect is all the more powerful for their stillness.
Neil Fullwood reviewing reminded of something in The High Window
Author biography
Robin Thomas completed the MA in Writing Poetry at Kingston University in 2012. He has had poems published in a number of journals including Acumen, Agenda, Envoi, Orbis, Brittle Star, Poetry Salzburg, Poetry Scotland, Pennine Platform, The High Window, South, Stand, Rialto, The Interpreters House and Tears in the Fence. He has been shortlisted for the Buzzwords, Bridport and Bath Poetry Café prizes and is represented in several anthologies. His pamphlet, A Fury of Yellow, was published by Eyewear in November, 2016. His debut collection, Momentary Turmoil, was published in 2018, followed by A Distant Hum in 2021, both with Cinnamon Press. Dempsey and Windle published his Cafferty pamphlet in 2021 and a collection Weather on the Moon was published by Two Rivers Press in 2022. Robin also had a flash fiction novella, Margot and the Strange Objects, published by Adhoc Publishing in 2022. reminded of something is his third collection with Cinnamon. Robin also works as a mentor for Cinnamon Press.