Reverence

In Reverence, Thomas A. Thomas further unfolds his mystical naturalism, finding for himself and offering to us ways to weave desire and grief into the greater ecstatic whole of life. A poetic descendant of Gary Snyder, Thomas practices taking each moment as spiritual, erotic, organic, tragic, and joyful. His world is alive, and this greater life pours in on us if only we open to it. He invites us: "The water // carrying starlight down / from the high peaks...." Even profound loss and inextinguishable sorrow prove, in his poems, to belong to such deliverance.

-Jed Myers, author of Can't Be Far

There is something sacred about Thomas A. Thomas's second collection of poetry, Reverence. These are poems of both bereavement and beauty as the poet insists that nature's dazzling presence and the blessing of having loved will prevail over the most profound grief. Thomas drives into the deep night of death, where the roadkill of a deer foreshadows that of a brother, a father and a wife. Yet, we are traveling beneath "the currents that move the stars" and "bright meteors / trailing tails of blue" as the poet imagines beyond "death's dark territory...to that one light."

-Heidi Seaborn, author of tic tic tic

In Reverence, Thomas A. Thomas brings the river inside the body and the body inside the river-and in that exchange, something essential is restored. These poems move between elegy and praise with the patience of water, witnessing marriage and mortality, the hawk on the hawthorn perch, the goldeneye ducks lifting a dark heart. Thomas knows what the non-human world has always known: that reverence is not a feeling but a practice. This is a collection for anyone who has ever taken their grief to the water and found themselves, briefly, held.

-CMarie Fuhrman, author of Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return

Thomas A. Thomas's Reverence is a poetic treatise on love. Define that four-letter word how you will, Thomas writes to it in this perfectly-paced effort. Nature, wild and free, human and heart-bound, is the object of every affection, each rhythmically-tuned illumination. The lone critique? That Thomas isn't sitting alongside each and every one of us, somewhere near quiet water sharing a life, line by line.

-J. Drew Lanham, author of Sparrow Envy