Memory Train by Larry Thacker

“’Leave your hate behind. It hurts and kills,’ writes Larry Thacker in his collection Memory Train. And that’s what Thacker does: whether he’s exploring the complexity of one’s relationship to the landscape (both interior and exterior) of the past, or inhabiting the voice of a government interrogator, Thacker moves us through arresting and urgent poems that seem always to be seeking the compassionate, human side of our common experience. “Your own imagination is my sharpest tool,” states Thacker, and with fine craft and exquisitely rendered emotion, he enters our minds and hearts and leaves us imprinted with poems that tell us what it means to lose and to find.”

–Aaron Smith

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

In Memory Train, Larry Thacker’s voice veers from the gothic into the romantic, from realism into naturalism, from telescoped metaphors to the hard, blunted truth. His language amplifies the quotidian—but more than that, his poems never squint away from the bright realities of danger and blood, of shadows cast through the lens of narrators who not only accept what is butmake it. His poems have a way of distancing the reader and then pulling them in close—a voice confident, unafraid, and lambent with intelligence. In “A rainstorm’s first notes,” the narrator sees vines in the garden “thickened / on a phone pole / shaped up / out like / a crucified body, a hanging watch, / leafy conductor.” Full of Dickinsonian layers and a language often as ecstatic as Dylan Thomas, Larry Thacker’s new collection is one I will read again and again not merely for chances to delight in its language, but for the wisdom thrumming through nearly every line.

–William Wright, Series Editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Author of Tree Heresies and Night Field Anecdote

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

Larry Thacker has written a set of poems so rich and muscular in its music that readers will think of the best of Ted Hughes, or of early Seamus Heaney. The poems in Memory Train convince us that they are inevitable as the forces that drive people into action. The voices here search for truth, and for understanding, “addicted to the night/-dream of making sense of it all,” as one poem calls it. Thacker reminds us how to love the difficult places we come from, and how to live there in the real present, not a misty-eyed version of the past. We are given the world as it is, for better or for worse, and Larry Thacker has turned it into a song that will stick in my memory for a long time.

–Jesse Graves, author of Basin Ghosts and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]