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Among the Living: Poems
Paperback
Publisher Price: $21.95
ISBN13: 9781773492070
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Published: Jan 8 2027
Pages: 102
Weight: 0.32
Height: 0.24 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Among the Living is Sally Thomas's second full-length collection, following Motherland (2020), and it measures a life by the rhythms of the church year and the nearness of death. The book falls into two movements. The first, The Hermit's Calendar, follows a solitary hermit through the liturgical seasons, from Advent through All Souls' Day, in a sequence of closely metered, rhymed poems, many of them sonnets, that turn prayer, weather, and the small labors of a hidden life into one sustained meditation. The second, Among the Living, widens outward to family and aging, the emptied nest, the North Carolina hills, and the ordinary hours where faith and mortality meet. Thomas writes in traditional forms with a plainspoken, exactly observed voice; owls, hawks, willow oaks, and candlelight recur as the furniture of attention. These are poems about being alive in full view of what does not last.
PRAISE FOR AMONG THE LIVING:
The poetry of Sally Thomas's Among the Living displays remarkable grace-in both the literary and religious senses. Her poems beautifully observe the natural world, and then advance to memorable meditations about the world we can sense, but cannot observe.
-A. M. Juster, author of Wonder & Wrath
There is an inner stillness and solitude in Sally Thomas's captivating new collection Among the Living, which makes every single poem an expression not only of exquisite physical detail but also of a vibrant spiritual life. In verses that are beautifully and satisfyingly crafted, Thomas penetrates the life of a hermit, and brings us into the simple yet profound truths of other relationships and scenes. This is poetry that illuminates the most authentic and essential aspects of experience in a lyrical style that reminds us how quotable and appealing poetry can be. Thomas's forms bring us the music we often seem to have lost in poetry; her depths make the reader realize what we too often neglect in life.
-Sally Read, editor of 100 Great Catholic Poems
If soul can be found where the inner and outer worlds overlap, the hermit persona of the remarkable sonnet sequence that forms Part One of Sally Thomas's new collection searches out the lessons of that space. The primal church or sanctuary is Nature as theophany, the cool blue nave of the hermit's known world, because (as the last poem in the book says) All the world's a mirror. The second half of the book brings this mirroring to the situations of the poet's everyday life, and it does this with a marvelous variety of formal effects and music. Like the hermit himself, Thomas's poetry persuades us to listen, again and again, for what cannot quite be named.
-Andrew Frisardi, author of The Moon on Elba
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Sally Thomas lived in the American West and in England before making her home in North Carolina. She is the author of a previous poetry collection, Motherland (Able Muse Press, 2020), as well as two poetry chapbooks, a novel, and a book of short stories. She is also coeditor of Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology, which received the 2023 Book Award in Culture and the Arts from Christianity Today. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in First Things, National Review, The New Yorker, Plough Quarterly, Public Discourse, Religion and Liberty, and other journals. Currently she serves as visiting professor in poetry at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and writes regularly for the Substack newsletter Poems Ancient and Modern.
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