Boiling It Down: :The Electronic Poetry Chapbooks of Larry D. Thomas

Literature & Fiction

THOMAS, Larry D.

United States

Blue Horse Press

<p>Inasmuch as the first three of Larry D. Thomas's eleven full-length poetry collections were largely set in West Texas where he was born and reared, his poetry became associated by many of his readers with the landscapes and people of West Texas and the Trans-Pecos region of the state. Although eleven of his print books, however, contain poems inspired by the Mississippi River Delta, In a Field of Cotton is his first poetry collection dedicated entirely to the Delta region and culture to which Thomas is vitally connected in spirit, emotion and by bloodline. The following is excerpted from his preface to In a Field of Cotton: “I am inextricably connected to the Mississippi River Delta in spirit, emotion, and by bloodline. Three of my grandparents, born in western Tennessee around 1880 (my paternal grandfather was born in Texas; his father was born in Mississippi), migrated to west Texas in the late 1890s. They traveled by covered wagon. All four of them worked their entire lives as tenant cotton farmers, although my paternal grandfather was also a mule trader. They plowed the cotton fields with mules, and hand-picked the cotton as soon as it was ready for harvesting. My mother and father, who were thirty-nine and forty years of age, respectively, at the time of my birth, also hand-picked cotton into their late twenties until my father started working at a Mobil service station. From the early years of my childhood, I heard stories about my family's experiences on the tenant farms, and was fascinated by how they hand-picked cotton much like the black slaves on plantations throughout the American South. These stories made me feel a strong connection to blacks and black culture which I still feel to this day.”</p>

In a Field of Cotton: Mississippi River Delta Poems

<p>Twenty-two poems centered on the circus and its culture."For years, Larry D. Thomas has been a contemporary master of the precise image, but with this new collection, we discover that he is also ringmaster and clown, lion-tamer and lion. In poems as well-honed as the knife-thrower's blade and as minutely accurate as his aim, this exceptional book honors well both its overt subject, the circus, and its implied subject, the making of art. These poems are infused with the high danger of artistic enterprise and should be approached with caution: their stark beauty cuts deep." --- Benjamin Myers, Oklahoma Poet Laureate</p>

The Circus

Poetry

A mature poet, Larry Thomas has an extraordinary gift which has evolved through decades at his craft. Thomas explores the natural world of Texas—its animal icons like the Hereford or hawk or rattlesnake, the larger-than-life geography, which is the stuff out of which legends are made.Thomas captures the spirit of place within larger truths that “travel well,” as editor Billy Bob Hill explains in his introduction. Hill also takes careful note of the poet’s deft alliteration and just-right compression of language as he urges readers to enjoy Thomas’ poems for their Texas elements but also the worldly art therein.

Larry D. Thomas: New and Selected Poems (TCU Texas Poets Laureate Series)

History & Criticism

TCU Press

The lighthouse keeper

Timberline Press

Stark Beauty

Timberline

Uncle Ernest

Virtual Artists Collective

In A Murder of Crows, Larry D. Thomas has artfully assembled decades of his writing about birds into a single volume of poetry. Thomas divides the collection into four sections. The first, "With Concentrated Grit," begins with a sparrow that "hops / easily its height, and quietly // explodes into flight... / flaunting for a moment its earth // tone browns and grays." It ranges through a whole aviary, from sparrows and pigeons ("the urban version / of the buzzard") to yellow-rumped warblers, house finches, and an old blue jay "arrogant / as a late Picasso, / raging beneath a blanket / at an auction." Section two, "Eyeing the Gulf," begins with "the mad / weightless dash" of a sanderling chick's life and continues through herons that could be "outgrowths / of the river itself" through laughing gulls "in rowdy reverence" through a whole range of seabirds. The third section, "Deft at Tearing Out Hearts," begins with the eagle for whom "everything that moves / is potential prey" and follows a "trajectory of violence" that includes the hawk "preying for rain" in Presidio whose "only water / was the blood of his prey" and the falcon "praying / his scarlet prayer / of devourment." The crow, the heart and soul of the collection, is the subject of the final section, which shares its title, "A Murder of Crows," with the whole. "History reeks," Thomas writes, with "the ineradicable / blackness" of the crow's ink. His crow poems speak to the crow "as metaphor, / for thousands / of years, / you've charged // our psyches, / forging / the dark iron / of your being // into symbols / of life, death / and the scales / of justice." Thomas offers the reader a primeval, poetic force appropriate to the terror of our times, "revealing as we breathe / the ravenous, reeking / psyche of our kind" -- a fitting tribute to the author of Crow, Ted Hughes, whose work Thomas has long admired, and to whose memory the collection is dedicated.

A Murder of Crows

As the title of this collection so evocatively states, the poems carefully nested in the pages of The Skin of Light sing to the matter embedded in spirit and the spirit wedded to matter, a fundamental twining that all gifted poets experience instinctively in their bones and in their blood. Though this Poet Laureate's subjects range from classic paintings to music, to marriage, to children at play on a beach and an old woman fiercely ready to take on death, the essential quality of each poem recognizes the depth and danger, the poignancy, pleasure, and pain inherent in every moment we share in this lifetime.

The Skin of Light

Dalton Pub

The Goatherd

Mouthfeel Press

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Books by THOMAS, Larry D.