Publisher: Trafford Publishing
2005
Paperback: 91 pages
ISBN: 1-4120-5292-0
English
5 Stars
The back of the book states “The poems in this book range from lyrical to surrealistic, despairing to sublime. the personae range from the monstrous, to the shamanistic, to the shamelessly in love.” I really can’t add anything to those truths. But I can add how the book affected me. Every poem has lyrical lines. Even the poems that I couldn’t relate to very much, contained great beauty. Thomas knows how to pick and choose his words, how to stitch them together into a different and melodious phrase.
The opening poem, Horse Dreams, reached out, grabbed me, and pulled me into a marvelous adventure of reading pleasure with the opening lines, “Because my mother rides over / the night hills of this farm,” to “The horse dreams of poets running.” to the last lines of this poem, “In the sky between a poet’s fingers, glaciers; / at night, women with horses’ eyes / leap from the fingertips.” After reading this poem three or four times, I thought perhaps I should see what the rest of the book offered. It is full of treats.
In a few pages, we are on a surreal journey with yellow leaves, a yellow dog racing on the ceiling, and a disappearing yellow horse. I found The Wren Child Dreams particularly touching. I, too, have sat up with the same child, but I was much younger, and adults still ruled my life, and had not the sympathy for the wren child I did. It is touching, and warming, to know I was not alone, though I felt it at the time.
In I swim with dogs, he writes, “…the dogs / are a sea, their smell a tide upon gently curved / hills and fields, running” The poem finishes with, “…I / run, I sing, I / swim with dogs.” To be young again. To run and sing, to howl and swim with the dogs. From swimming with dogs, he takes us on a journey to Love in Dear Stranger, Return with the last line offering not just a prayer, but a promise, “When the heart is ready, the loved one appears.”
An Autumn Beach— where “seaweed stems blow across the / flat expanses like dried umbilical cords,” and too soon to the final poem, Night Song, the final poem, a symphony of songs of the night from the unseen spirit to the owl song and dog song, to the rising of our sun and wakefulness with the “dawn song / old song.”
As I wrote this review, I went through the book, re-read several of the poems, and those lines I’d marked with fluorescent stickers. I realize this this a book that not only have I read it more than once, but it will become a night companion on by bedside table. Thomas A. Thomas is a poet of many voices, all of them melodious. I heartily recommend this book .