Robin Thomas

CAFFERTY'S TRUCK by Robin Thomas

The critics on Robin Thomas' other books:

Michael Loveday on Momentary Turmoil (Cinnamon 2018):
The book is a rich, sustaining feast … a restless urge for experimentation … his interest in questions of aesthetics … his twin capacity to be removed and involved, dispassionate and sensitive … mischievous, absurdist streak …

Thomas writes intelligent poetry that balances challenge, accessibility, and imaginative risk. His engagement with history, culture, and the history of culture broadens the material in this book to a degree that is, in a debut, both unusual and welcome.

D.A. Prince on ‘Movables’ in A Fury of Yellow (Eyewear 2016)
Furniture can’t speak but it holds involuntary associations and memories. That’s where Robin Thomas takes us. It’s a rich stream of consciousness, running through teenage angst, school homework, a teacher’s sarcasm, the voice of Dad calling him down to dinner, a girlfriend. Thoughts and voices, simultaneously jumbled and logical, jostle underneath the surface of the opening line. It’s a lifetime’s chatter, from then to now, sketched in — because that’s how memory works. Ordinary life is rich, full, complicated and bound into the present. Robin Thomas, in this textured poem, shows how.

Robin Thomas completed the MA in Writing Poetry at Kingston University in 2012. He has had poems published in Agenda, Envoi, Orbis, Brittle Star, Poetry Salzburg, Poetry Scotland, Pennine Platform, The High Window, South, Stand, Rialto, The Interpreters House and North. He has been shortlisted for the Buzzwords, Bridport and Bath Poetry Café prizes and is represented in the Stanley Spencer anthology published by Two Rivers Press in 2017. His pamphlet, A Fury of Yellow, was published by Eyewear in November, 2016. His collections Momentary Turmoil and A Distant Hum were published by Cinnamon in March 2018 and March 2021 respectively.

Anne Bailey reviews Cafferty's Truck in Sphinx Reviews
A vehicle for meaning
Perhaps all poems are vehicles for meaning, but this pamphlet adopts that idea in a concrete and literal sense; Cafferty’s truck is the protagonist of the poems, not the man himself. The truck appears in most of the poems. Sometimes, as in ‘Journey’, it is moving around:
The truck makes its way
through village and town
and comes to a stop.
[…]
and up through the hills
goes the rackety truck
to a place with a horse
and a church and a pub
Sometimes it is waiting, as in ‘Cafferty visits the Jeff Koons exhibition’:
The truck is parked
as close as permitted
to the Ashmolean Museum
[…]
After a time
it inches from its parking space
[…]
in order to go somewhere else.
Sometimes the truck is compared to other vehicles. In the title poem ‘Cafferty’s Truck’:
Byrne, in his trim red van,
respectfully following, follows
Cafferty’s yesterdays with his tomorrows.
At first I was reminded of children’s TV programmes such as Postman Pat or Fireman Sam but as the poems progressed I began to appreciate the very understated characterisation of a man’s life through the extended metaphor of his truck, which in ‘Cafferty in Tesco’ becomes a shopping trolley and in ‘Cafferty at Sea’ becomes ‘The rust-smeared ferry’.
I particularly enjoyed the poem ‘The Egg’. Perhaps this is as near as we get to the man himself: 'On the part-occupied table for two / in the corner of Café Nineveh', a ‘long-awaited egg’ is to be served. That first line is so subtle — there he is but not quite. The egg is the subject of the poem and the truck waits outside.
The pamphlet left me in a state of meditation about life as a journey, the elegant simplicity of life when it is pared down like this and questions about what any of us amount to really."

Ian House reviews 'Cafferty's Truck' in The High Window (Winter Edition 2021):
"In this slight and momentous pamphlet of twenty-three short poems, Cafferty and his truck go from here to there, from somewhere to anywhere, for various reasons or for none. The journeys are absurd and unreal and utterly convincing, the very stuff of our own lives and of the lives of the mysterious others we see going about their daily and unknown business
[.....]
This engagingly quirky collection is a shaggy dog story that leads us up the garden path and round the houses on a journey fraught with significance. Its characters (three men, a horse, a van and a truck) travel an allegorical road but in a land, perhaps suggested by their names, of blarney. I’d not be surprised if Cafferty knows Vladimir and Estragon. His is a sad story and great fun."

Susan Utting on 'Cafferty's Truck': "Subtlety is a feature of the writing. Poems not seeming to be about Cafferty’s truck become relevant to its progress, or lack of it.
Nowhere is Cafferty described; he doesn’t speak. How is it that we feel we know and love him and are rooting for him to keep going? It’s a tour de force."

Wendy Klein on Cafferty's Truck: "nuanced, sophisticated, with shadings of the allegorical!"

ISBN 978-1-913329-55-6
2021
Paperback, 200 x 12.5cm
34 pages
RRP £8.00

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