|
:
Songs Sacred and Profane
Songs Sacred and Profane is a selection from Thomas' four other books and eight chapbooks plus many poems that have not appeared in book form. This volume contains, in fact, two quite different books published as one. Greenside Up, written almost entirely looking into his garden, is made up of bucolic works which observe nature and a quiet life. They are well mannered, introspective, and show the poet's sensitivity to language and his world. Let It All Hang Out lets loose with poems that show Thomas' acerbic wit at times, his wry approach to human foibles, and his personal take on religion coupled with various aspects of love, mutability, and mortality.
. The first section of his book, Songs Sacred and Profane, moves through the four seasons. The second half widens into poems of personal philosophy (or religious views), observations of the human condition, wit and humor, aging, death, and whatever else catches the poet's eye. Thomas believes that a poem says one thing when it means another. These poems present their pictures in concise form, but the ideas they invoke move far outside their frames.
Half of Thomas' Songs Sacred and Profane covers the times of the day and the year in light, lyric form. The other half presents the poet's views and skills, covering a wide range of forms and styles.
To view an excerpt "click" here
To Order... "click" here
Three Autobiographies
The three sections of Three Autobiographies relate, directly or obliquely to the background and experience of the author. "Flights from Arabia" intertwines Thomas' observations as teacher in Saudi Arabia with contrasting and comparable experiences in other places where he lived. In "The Autobiography of Larry W. Larry" a growing boy tries to find himself, interacting with his alter ego, a dead boy who is very active through much of the story. Unknown aspects of the life of Robert Spencer Anderson, an invented autobiographical amalgam, are revealed through examination of newspaper articles, notebooks, and writings in "The Anderson File."
To view an excerpt "click" here
To Order... "click" here
The Face in the Mirror
The Face in the Mirror is an art book. It was created by a graphic artist and a poet who worked together with a designer to produce high quality reproductions of black-and-white collages and visual poetry, each augmenting the other. Special papers prevent bleed-through. The cover is an enlarged detail from the title poem.
To view an excerpt "click" here
To Order... "click" here
If Somebody Laughs It Must Be Funny
The humor of the book If Somebody Laughs It Must Be Funny begins with its format: half the book is printed upside-down, creating two books in one. The collection of sketches, stories, and poetry is off beat, sometimes ribald, sometimes sinister, all aimed at bringing a smile if not a belly laugh or two.
To view an excerpt "click" here
To Order... "click" here
The Autobiography of William Shakespeare
The announcement that a four-hundred-year-old manuscript discovered in a London garret proved to be Shakespeare's hand-written autobiography would create literary sensation. A note penned in Greek on the cover stating, :"I wish I had written this man's plays," and signed by Aristotle would confuse just about everyone. That is the aim of The Autobiography of William Shakespeare. Into the fetid cloisters of academia proudly marches this trampling on tradition with muddy buskins. Anyone whose doctoral thesis in on Shakespeare's Men in Women's Dresses, or those with PhD's in Computerized Special Effects' Influence on Elisabethan Dramaturgy will find space on their library shelves for this book. Others will flip blindly through its pages the way they cruise TV channels.
To view an excerpt "click" here
To Order... "click" here
Beyond The Bridge
Back-to-the-woods poetry finds a welcome voice in this collection with its symbolic bridge whisking readers away from cities into the poet’s more comfortable world of plants and animals. Each poem focuses in on its subject—nature at work, revealed, or speculated upon—and expands to reveal man’s place among the creatures that surround him.
The poems range from meditations on a piece of birch bark, to geological speculations when finding a Petoskey stone. There is a bestiary of north woods animals along with flora, weather conditions, and the poet’s state of mind away from cities.
To view an excerpt "click" here
To Order... "click" here
Man's Wolf to Man
In the introduction of Man’s Wolf to Man, his ninth book, Laurence W. Thomas says, “Mankind should have advanced beyond the animal instinct to strike and kill when threatened: apparently, we have not.” His poems in this collection deal more with the aftermath of wars, what happens to the people who survive, than to what causes wars. In another place, the poet asks his readers to “imagine how Americans would react had we lost [WWII] and the Nazis ran roughshod through our cities.”
Thomas knows wars only after the fact. He lived in the ruins of Berlin, visited bomb-ridden Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, and Displaced Persons camps in Germany, Lebanon, Iran, and Jordan. He reacts to man’s inhumanity to man sometimes with irony—“What we need is a really good war - - Without such wars, we can never know what is meant by peace.”—other times with more subtlety as in “Lady Crossing a Street—a neutral political allegory,” a thinly-veiled parable of how we got entangled in Iraq.
To view an excerpt "click" here
To Order... "click" here
Homage to Carl Rakosi
The poems in this book emulate the various poetic styles of American poet Carl Rakosi (1903-2004), not the content nor philosophy of his work. Rakosi perfected a method of the dropped line, but he also dealt with prose poems, epigrams, imagism (or objectivism), surrealism, the long poem, and other poetic styles that are reflected in this book. The themes in Homage to Carl Rakosi are eclectic, ranging from poems on man’s place in society, nature, and religion, to observations on childhood and aging, the human condition, and the world in which we find ourselves.
To view an excerpt "click" here
To Order... "click" here
Moment of Comfort
The poems in this Moment of Comfort, a Congeries of Formal Verse, is a chapbook of sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, haiku and other metered, patterned, and rhymed verse. Its tone ranges from serious to humorous, from lyrical to wry.
To view an excerpt "click" here
To Order... "click" here
|
