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Jeffrey Thomson
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Jeffrey Thomson
© 2004 by Parlor Press. 84 pages
ISBN 1-932559-14-0
($14.00, paper)
ISBN 1-932559-15-9 ($26.00, cloth)
ISBN 1-932559-16-7 ($10.00 Adobe eBook)
View a larger image of the cover.
Description
Jeffrey Thomson’s second collection of poems, The Country of
Lost Sons, investigates the narrative environment of childhood, especially the
way violence is inscribed on children through myth, culture, and legend.
The poems trace the growth of the author’s young son (his vulnerability
and equal potential for violence) across a landscape of rewritten myth
and narrative. From the Trojan War (bracketed as it is by the deaths of
two children, Iphegenia and Astyanax) through the Biblical accounts of
Job, Jeremiah, and Jephthah to the modern tragedies of the war in Kosovo,
AIDS, and the contemporary culture of violence, the poems build to a culmination
of fear that is only tempered by love, grace, and the redemptive power
of storytelling itself.
What Others Have Said
In the midst of so many fast-talking contemporary poetry books comes
Jeffrey Thomson’s lovely The Country of Lost Sons. Here is a
book that chooses tender, meditative music over electric chatter. Here
are the poems that tell us poetry can still explore and heal earnestly.
More than praise, I want to offer gratitude for such an intimate book.
After reading it, you will want to offer gratitude too. — Terrance
A. Hayes
If horror is a given in the world, what place exists for beauty? If
children are given in ransom to the gods, what parent can give thanks? The
Country of Lost Sons takes Job’s children, and Jephthah’s
daughter, and Hector’s son, lost at Troy, and fashions from their
stories a cautionary chronicle for our own place and time, where love
aspires to the condition of protection, but protection serves merely
as prelude to elegy. —Lynne McMahon
Jeffrey Thomson’s The Country of Lost Sons imagines a land where
the aggrieved and the grieving come wounded together, across borders
of time and nation, epochs of loss and resurrection. There, they are
redeemed, if not in fact then in his poems’ muscular music and
flint-edged wisdom. So many things “hiss” in these poems—shoes,
doors, paper, even grass—we sense the horror lurking within daily
graces. It’s this horror Thomson interrogates and then reinvents
in the deadly flight of Philoctetes’s arrow and his own son’s
small-fisted punch. Beneath the city’s shattered walls—ours,
after all—Thomson raises the “terrible blessing of hope.” —Kevin
Stein
The Country of Lost Sons, Jeffrey Thomson’s brilliant new book,
shows the poet to be a man deeply read in western and world literature,
a poet who sees the past and present, life and art, as inseparable, and
yet this knowledge is never forced, never pretentious—just a vital
part of life as we live it day to day. How else can we understand the
joys and horrors we live except in the context of everyone’s joys
and horrors, the book seems to ask. That knowledge and the passion of
its saying tips everything toward joy. —Andrew Hudgins
About the Author
The Country of Lost Sons is Jeffrey Thomson’s third collection
of poetry. His first collection of poetry was The Halo Brace (Birch Brook
Press). Renovation, his third book, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon
University Press. He has also published poetry and nonfiction in Quarterly
West, New Delta Review, Puerto del Sol, Gulf Coast, and Willow
Springs,
as well as critical essays on Sandra Cisneros, James Wright, Derek Walcott
and the environmental elegy. He has been a Fellow at the Writers @ Work
Conference and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference.
His works have won numerous awards, including the Master’s Poetry
Contest and the Academy of American Poets’ Prize on three occasions.
He received his PhD from the University of Missouri in Creative Writing
in 1996 and is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Chatham
College in Pittsburgh where he directs the MFA in Writing program.
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