Redgate is the story of how community slowly accretes out of everyday necessities, always gruelling, sometimes cruel. When the labour is hard, and making can also be an un-making. Wood’s poems bear witness to the contiguity of grief and green growing things. The red of knuckles and beets. Hard-won victories and soft-spoken celebrations. Wood is so alive to where words begin and where they can lead. A deep ecological and historical awareness, and tenderness for his people/s, his land/s — entities that never loom, instead quicken like heartbeats in the presence of something dear. Poems like small, living creatures with bendable bones — endoskeletons of thought gently clothed in such warm, vivid flesh… He follows their shapes, their sounds, knowing that sometimes their physicality may lie in the very word “sound”. There is, in poem after poem, the surprising turn, never abrupt or studied, the sure-handedness of placing the pivot precisely. The almost-classical ‘volta’ given a new voltage in this poet’s work, suffused by a “knowing” that is at once ancient and just-beginning. Sweetness survives and darkness is never disavowed. There are “corpses … rotten as the soil”; there is “corruption and whiteness”. There is mourning for the disasters we have wrought on this planet. Seasons are relentless, and who knows when “they” become “we”? Robert Wood claims his place in this world and, through these poems, makes it ours. — Sampurna Chattarji