The Urgency of Snails
Robin Gilbert
ISBN 9781068488306
 
The music of the local, the satisfaction of sound, a delight in nature and a wry humour are amongst the elements which give Robin Gilbert’s poetry its endearing and particular grace.
(Alison Brackenbury, winner of Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards and author of numerous collections, most recently Thorpeness, 2022) 
 
Robin Gilbert combines a profound sense of the weight and feel of words, and the limits of poetic form, with an ability to cut through what Coleridge called the ‘film of familiarity’ and extract the striking image or the crucial idea. In this generous collection, he directs his eye – by turns wise, compassionate, cynical, joyful or resigned – towards the natural world, crafting verse of skill and wit. Whether it’s a ‘camera obscura of high-hedged flooded lane’, or a kingfisher ‘painter’s palette/of bright oils/sheen shadowed/bravura on a branch’; the discarded skin of a grass snake ‘delicate, diaphanous/sloughed like an evening glove’, or the ‘unhurried corpulence’ of a pig ‘scrumping for succulent roots’, there are lines in these poems that lodge deep in your mind, and which will bring you back to this remarkable collection again and again.
(Ross Cogan, Gregory Award winner and author of three collections, the most recent being Bragr, 2018, and of the verse play Agincourt)
 
Robin Gilbert’s The Urgency of Snails is a paean to nature. From the smallest springtail to the philosopher mole and the heron which flies ‘with the unhurried languor/of a slowly shaken rug’, his acute observation and deft touch with metaphor offers the reader a fresh and sometimes unexpected look at the world. Robin’s delight in language is apparent and I, in turn, was delighted by his use of regional names for the birds he so clearly loves: bumbarrel, lintwhite, bull spink, Joe Bent. However, he also acknowledges the risks in taking this all for granted; the pig field under threat from developers, the pond dried by drought, reminding us to pay attention to what we could lose.
(Angela France, senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Gloucestershire and founder of Buzzwords. The most recent of her six collections is Terminarchy, 2021)