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Book Cover for: Amazing Grace: Poems, Larry D. Thomas

Amazing Grace: Poems

Larry D. Thomas

A collection of poems from the winner of the 2001 Texas Review Poetry Prize.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Trp: The University Press of Shsu
  • Publish Date: Jan 14th, 2002
  • Pages: 80
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.63in - 5.46in - 0.35in - 0.31lb
  • EAN: 9781881515401
  • Categories: American - GeneralSubjects & Themes - Places

About the Author

LARRY D. THOMAS, born and raised in West Texas, earned his B.A. degree in English from the University of Houston. In 1998, he retired from a career in adult criminal justice with the Harris County, Texas, Community Supervision and Corrections Department, where he served as a branch manager from 1983-1998. Book-length manuscripts of Thomas's poetry were selected as finalists in the 1993 and 1997 Southern and Southwestern Poets Breakthrough Series competitions sponsored by Texas Review Press and the Summer 2000 Pecan Grove Press national chapbook competition. His poetry and reviews have appeared in numerous national journals, including the Southwest Review, Poet Lore, The Midwest Quarterly, The Texas Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Cottonwood, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Puerto del Sol, Writers' Forum, The Chattahoochee Review, International Poetry Review, The Cape Rock and Louisiana Literature.

Praise for this book

Larry Thomas's Amazing Grace is Texas in poetry but speaks, as fine poetry does, to more than just Texas. Just as Georgia O'Keeffe's starkly beautiful paintings of the Palo Duro Canyon speak to a myriad of audiences, Thomas's poems, set among the land, cattle, and people living in the stark and often dangerous beauty of various parts of Texas, speak to the human condition, not simply the Texas condition.
Thomas takes us into the Big Thicket, to the coast, and to the borderlands in stark scenes of transcendent beauty with some slight terror undergirding everything. In writing of a hawk in the "Near The Big Thicket" section of Amazing Grace, Thomas feels "the brutal cold, with nothing but the hooded, / Brooding terror of his presence." "Amazing Grace" is the eponymous poem of this fine collection and it is a poem about a remarkable woman who lives on the land, preferring it to the city. Old at this stage in her life, approaching death, "she still rises before the light...." And it is a palpable "warm, amber light / savory as the brandy of aged literature / swirling in the snifter of her skull." This is the "amazing" grace of Larry Thomas' verse: beautifully written, cohesive, marking the danger in the beauty; the redemptive grace that comes from both the small terrors and the great beauty of the land. This is a wonderful collection and Thomas is a poet you will not want to miss.
--H. Palmer Hall, author of From the Periphery: Poems and EssaysandDeep Thicket & Still Waters