Renovation (Poems)
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Renovation (Poems)
By: Jeffrey Thomson
In Renovation, Jeffrey Thomson explores the distances between people and between worlds, and how those distances can be overcome to provide brief glimpse of harmony, and yet quickly the distance returns. As in his poem My Mother's Sunflowers (an excerpt)
and in the poem Still Life with Rain and Rilke (an excerpt)
By: Jeffrey Thomson
In Renovation, Jeffrey Thomson explores the distances between people and between worlds, and how those distances can be overcome to provide brief glimpse of harmony, and yet quickly the distance returns. As in his poem My Mother's Sunflowers (an excerpt)
their petals flat on the dirt.
Though I know the Egyptians
called the soul of a bird
with a human face, I couldn't
leave the earth where she was tucked,
her face buried in her wings.
and in the poem Still Life with Rain and Rilke (an excerpt)
I've forgotten his sputtering words,
words so fragile they broke across our patio
like porcelain. So I am left with what is left;
Despite the imagery of distances and discourse, some of his poems are also gentle in their content. The poem The Postman displays that essence (an excerpt)
on the median of a one way road
to a glorious city of flight hidden inside
a succession of land-fall palms and orchids,
watching a migration to a birdless city
of butterflies, succulent and blossom
This is Thomson's third book of poetry. His notes are included at the back of the book.
Paperback; 72 pages
About the Author
Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, and translator, and is the author of multiple books including Half/Life: New and Selected Poems, The Belfast Notebooks, fragile, Birdwatching in Wartime, TheComplete Poems of Catullus, and From the Fishouse.
He has traveled widely and with his colleague, Drew Barton, a field ecologist and tree biologist, regularly teaches a course on environmental writing and the experience of nature in Costa Rica.
Thomson received his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri in 1996. He has been an NEA Fellow and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar.
He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington’s BFA in Creative Writing. Thomson and his family live in Maine.
Praise for Renovation...
"Throughout the course of his work, Jeffrey Thomson has been laboring to compose a poem whose thought is apprehensible through the senses, and whose passions are, to borrow his term, renovated in the troubling mind.
This book is the fruit of that labor: at once worldly and intimate, interior and attuned to particulars, its poems speak with the confidence of one who has come to accept Stevens’ claim that 'the world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.'"
--Sherod Santos (poet, professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia and author of Square Inch Hours and A Poetry of Two Minds.
..These gentle, often elegiac poems reveal Thomson as a writer full of tenderness and nuance. I keep referring to this book as Revelation, not Renovation, and that says it all."
--Jim Daniels (poet, professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and author of several poetry books including The Middle Ages and Street.