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| "Photographers
once risked their hands and eyes, igniting vials of magnesium
powder, so powerful is the love of the image," says the title
poem of Robert’s new collection, Dragging the Lake,
whose images range from the northern lights to St. Bridget
turning bathwater into beer. "Did you know some people claim
to have heard the aurora?" one poem asks. The muses
of music and image wrestle in these poems, but from the songs
of Elvis Costello to the operas of Leoš Janácek,
music seems to prevail, even against "the glorious, trillion-spined
black lava slicing through your flip-flops" and "night jasmine
kicking the door ajar." |
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| “A
far-ranging mind made these poems, one in which intelligence
and imagination combine in a rare ability to reason with imagery
and sound. That may seem a familiar definition of poetic talent,
but in these poems it gives the voice an authority that’s
both reliable and constantly surprising. Thomas can enter another
consciousness, century, or personal history with as much facility
as he moves through his own life and world. Thus, although many
poems are written in persona, they feel more like an inhabitation
than a trick of ventriloquism. Yet for all its interest in the
mind’s capacity to travel outside of itself, this is poetry
written in the pure American English of the present moment.
Dragging the Lake is smart, funny, moving, and profound.” |
| —Chase
Twichell |
| “Robert
Thomas knows what a frenulum is, and the skills a shoemaker
needed in 1623. His range of reference and imagery is wide,
including music (classical and popular), history, and the hard
sciences, and from these he makes poems unlike anyone else’s.
He can be lyrically contemporary, or speak in extended narratives
through the personae of Leoš Janácek, Jakob Boehme,
and Jacqueline du Pré. Dragging the Lake is
richly textured, various, deeply satisfying, and snazzy.” |
| —Brendan
Galvin |
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Poems
Amazon