My Heart Is Not Asleep (coming soon)
(By Thomas A. Thomas)
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| Author | Thomas A. Thomas |
What a blessing this book is: poems earned from the threshold of love and loss, attuned to music, drenched in gorgeous imagery, and with the steady cadence of a voice willing to stay with pain and revelation. The offering of these poems, which is a true kind of gift and medicine, is one born of a courage,
to return to a heart that is not asleep, that is again and again awake and open to the ravishing heartbreak of the slow loss of a beloved, and to the persistent beauty of fog and the Salish sea, of the scrape of seal whiskers on the bottom of a kayak, of huckleberry and cedar fronds and ferns, where “bright silent, urgent light rushes to touch it all.” Thomas reminds us that grief and beauty are inexorable, and that patient attunement and intimacy with beauty is a path that can carry us through.
—Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Breath on a Coal
Thomas Thomas’s tender poems of love and grief are beautiful and powerful, sometimes overwhelming the reader with their unabashed emotion: “I know, I know, I know everything loved is to be lost / and scattered; and yet the daily lesson drums / in the blood beneath my skin.” Thomas’s well-crafted poems lament the shortness of life while celebrating memory’s power to keep the past alive.
—Michael Simms, author of Strange Meadowlark
What a poignant pleasure it is to read My Heart Is Not Asleep, bittersweet as many of Thomas’s subjects are. I felt like I was kayaking with the poet, walking the beach with him, taking in all the natural wonders that offer him consolation on a daily basis. Thomas has captured the anguish of ambiguous loss— the endless ebbing that is dementia—but he has also captured the intimate connection that is still there for so long; and that love that never ends.
—Ann Hedreen, author of Her Beautiful Brain”
