Motherland: Poems

Motherland: Poems

by Sally Thomas
Motherland: Poems

Motherland: Poems

by Sally Thomas

Hardcover

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Overview

In Sally Thomas’s Motherland, the poet keenly observes the ephemeral and the everlasting in the lens of time—the daily into seasonal transformations, the gifts and wonders of nature and people. Motherland by turns hails and interrogates in matters of flesh, of faith and spirituality—especially so in the “Richeldis of Walsingham” poem sequence. This finalist in the Able Muse Book Award is a collection abounding in insight, hope, grace, surprises, and yes, love.

PRAISE FOR MOTHERLAND:

A core of spiritual knowledge resides in the poems of Sally Thomas’s Motherland— knowledge that might seem strange to the poet herself, in fact, though it definitely resides in her, and radiates throughout this collection. Motherland is the perfect title, since the poet, herself a mother, regards all her human occupations as native and yet mysterious, occurring in a place which is both foreign and familiar. The final sequence, on Richeldis of Walsingham, includes lines that describe the expression of that knowledge, as “the eloquence/ Of the small river moving always forward to the unseen/ Sea.” Motherland is a book of the presence—radiant, benevolent, challenging—for which there is often no word, except as we find in poetry, like the poetry of Sally Thomas.”
  —Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry

The poems of Sally Thomas are poems in which the act of looking at the world in all its depth and complexity is just about as close as possible to being fully realized in the corresponding “world” of poetic language and form. And the verses are compelling because in every line something is at stake: our very understanding of creation, the human condition, and the mystery of thought and its language that link us, however imperfectly, to what may be called the given world. As Thomas says in “Frost,” “Tricky winter light and my own eye/ Bend the world, if not to beauty, then/ To strangeness.”
  —David Middleton (from the foreword), author of The Fiddler of Driskill Hill

In her most recent collection of poems, Motherland, Sally Thomas gives us a world we live in but, alas, too often don’t seem to see. So much is lost, these poems tell us, even as they manage to reinstate and re-imagine these losses for us. All poetry is elegiac, even as it can, in the hands of a serious poet, celebrate the very world which for all of us keeps slipping away in the great wheel of time. Then too there is her mastery of poetic form—among these the sonnet, the villanelle, the couplet, and her unparalleled command of rhyme and slant rhyme. What a delight to discover a poet who has found a way to allow the sacred and the sacramental inform her poems in a surprising range of contemporary idioms.
  —Paul Mariani, author of Epitaphs for the Journey

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sally Thomas was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1964, and was educated at Vanderbilt University, the University of Memphis, and the University of Utah. She spent some years living in the American West and in Great Britain before settling in North Carolina, her current home. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Fallen Water (2015) and Richeldis of Walsingham (2016), both from Finishing Line Press. Over the last two decades, her poetry and fiction have appeared in Dappled Things, First Things, Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, Southern Poetry Review, the New Yorker, the Rialto, and other journals in the United States and Great Britain.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781773490823
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Publication date: 10/07/2020
Pages: 126
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.44(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vi

Foreword ix

Change-Ringing 3

In That Place 4

Obscure Constellation in Winter 6

Angelus 8

Hindsight 10

New Year’s Day 11

Foster Child 20

For You 22

Bridge Morning 23

Girl on Roller Skates 25

Lookout Mountain 27

Deer Apples 28

Snow Weather 30

Poem in Advent 31

Christmas Day in the Morning 32

Magus at Twilight 33

Frost 34

Tableau 35

Daybreak 36

Morning, with Goldfinches 37

Sonnet for Ash Wednesday 40

Burial in Holy Week 41

Holy Saturday 42

Exercise 43

At the Millpond 44

Epithalamion for a Renewal of Vows 45

Anniversary 47

Souvenir in Trier 48

In a Café 50

Introvert 51

Storm Season 52

Detachment 53

White Morning, Crows 55

Moonlight Sestina 57

Lamplight 59

My Father Drawing in an Upstairs Room 60

Reunion 61

Aunts 63

Laundromat 66

Tracks 67

Commemorative Model 69

Dolphins 71

Bees 73

Grandmother Rising 74

Offering 75

Richeldis of Walsingham 76

biddan 77

scryn 78

richeldis 80

stangefeall 81

ham 82

duru 84

aefentid 85

þrines 86

gemynd 87

richeldis 88

brecan 89

fisc 90

halig dag 91

wendan 93

wif 95

modor 97

sceadu 99

brimfugol 100

richeldis 101

hus 102

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