$14.99
In poems filled with delicately nuanced music (“intoxicated moths,” “the puckered lake relaxes,” “every tree’s leaves knuckled down”), Thomas Griffin holds out an almost Keatsian hand to us. Even as we feel its warmth draining, we’re buoyed by moments of fresh observation and beauty (“the grasses sigh in the warm hands / of the evening breeze” or “the clouds grow more themselves / and fill their pockets with snow”). Whether elegiac or urgent, each poem is a momentary stay of execution, even as we are “winging through this darkness” and eventually “will die from / everything [we] hold onto.” This wonderful first collection comes to us, open-palmed and alive.
–Kate Gleason, author of Measuring the Dark (First Book Award, Zone 3 Press) and Reading Darwin While My Father Dies (Anabiosis Press).
All That Once Was You
by Thomas Griffin
$14.99, paper
978-1-63534-582-7
2018
Thomas Griffin‘s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, recognized with an Academy of American Poets Prize, and continues to be published widely in journals, magazines, reviews, and anthologies. Thomas has an MFA in writing from Goddard College.
Ann Buckingham –
The poetry of Thomas Griffin is accessible yet profound, enormously self-aware. Finely crafted poems with a fecund metaphorical imagination that invites the reader to observe more closely the natural world and the one within.
Robt O’Sullivan Schleith –
This first collection by the author is so overdue. The usage of second person viewpoint throughout lends a semi-therapeutic voice at times; e.g. the Pushcart-nominated poem (from which the book’s title was taken), which is so satisfying, and has become my favorite moment in the book. Other highlights include ‘When the Demons Come Out’, ‘From August to the Moon’ and ‘The Poetry in Living’. Discoveries abound upon each new reading of the book.
Jeanne Marie Walsh (verified owner) –
These poems are accessible in the best sense, pulling the reader into the full, complex experience of life-in-the-world. The book develops like well-crafted music, beginning in dark places and transforming through many images, questions, and emotions until the last poem, Lovelife, a title that’s both a noun and an imperative. An urgent voice speaks throughout this collection; we’d be wise to listen.
Kevin Fitzsimmons (verified owner) –
This collection of individually, direct contemplations offered with precise, clean use of language, is, as a whole, calling us to clarity and honesty about this life we are in.
Chris Pratt (verified owner) –
Thomas’s work is sometimes dark, sometimes magical, sometimes haunting and sometimes beautiful.
Bill Pelz-Walsh (verified owner) –
Griffin’s poetry is poignant, powerful and personal. Seems to come from the river of the soul.