A house to be shut up*
(considers how we must be obedient to the fact of getting older)
The time of my quickness is gone.
Now my pace is that of a child
on a midnight stair. So bear with me, please,
if I drape too long a shadow on your day
as I lean to your table
and turn over this or that trinket.
Soon enough though slow we’ll straighten up
and let the light at you again. I’ll walk away
while my shadow bestows itself on casual elsewheres
like a sheet in a house to be shut up for the summer,
floating down fully spread,
knowing before it makes first touch
the breadth of peace its furnishing will need
Press Release
‘Michael W. Thomas’s poems always spring surprises of description, of language and of story’ – David Hart, author of Setting the poem to words, The Crag Inspector and Running Out.
‘Michael W. Thomas’ poems are rich with the details of past and present lives. They explore the wildest possibilities of those lives with passion and humour’ – Alison Brackenbury.
‘Michael W. Thomas tears the traditions of metaphors and similes apart. One feels each word took him hours to select before he cemented it in place; he has complete control of his medium’ – Kirby Congdon, US poet, dramatist, editor and associate of the Beat Poets; author of Selected Poems and Prose Poems and New Mystic, Connecticut, Sixty-Five Years Ago.
In Under Smoky Light, Michael’s poems fully justify such appraisal. Grouped in four sections – ‘A tunnel for the gust of time’, ‘Under smoky light’, ‘Down the road I go’ and ‘All that waits’ – they offer the reader striking landscapes both real and imagined, explorations of lives both present and past and reflections on the future in all its enthralling possibilities. The collection, says Simon Fletcher of Offa’s Press, is ‘first rate.’
***
*Autumn 2020: Michael W. Thomas’s new poetry collection, Under Smoky Light, is now out from Offa’s Press.
ISBN: 978-1-9996943-4-0
Available from https://offaspress.co.uk/ (‘Good on the page, good on the stage’). The orders page is https://offaspress.co.uk/shop/
