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.
Robin Thomas. Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, 84 pages, November 2025.
Praise for Robin Thomas’s Poetry:
‘I find myself smiling with recognition as I read Robin Thomas’ view of the universe in its enormity and its dispassionate enforcement of the “laws of nature.” After all, ambiguity and contradiction are embedded in comedy of the most serious kind. This is a book that I’ll keep at the front of my bookshelf, to be reread and dipped into often’— JANICE DEMPSEY on The Weather on the Moon
‘Thomas’s great achievement is to … give the reader what is needed, no less and no more. An artist’s preliminary sketch may engage the viewer more fully than the completed oil painting, for the painting may be merely whatever it is, whereas the sketch suggests and becomes all its possibilities. Thomas’s sketches … hang about in the mind long after we have read them, for the mind is still at work, still feeding on them’— IAN HOUSE on ‘Cafferty’s Truck’