
Now
Thomas Simmons(Author)
Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Published on 1. May 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
112 pages
978-0-9986404-0-2 (ISBN)
Description
PRAISE for NOW
"The abundance of Tom Simmons' imagination is matched by his tireless intellectual curiosity. A copious, ardent, richly musical book of poetry."
~ Robert Pinsky
"Thomas Simmons is a poet of astonishing lines that stun the page with informed candor. He has many voices and forms, all consistent with a learned poet who looks and photos world events and passion historically in ancient, modern, and experimental passages. He is the mind’s astronomer. He gazes at eternal heavens fallen yet strolling on earth. I expect many new word constellations will be carrying his signature. His pen is as sharp as his eye."
Willis Barnstone, Author
Poets of the Bible: from Solomon to John of Revelation
Fred Cody Life Achievement Award
"Thomas Simmons possesses an uncanny ability to weave together in his poems elements of the past, present, and future, refracted through details that are at once quotidian and eternal. Now offerscompelling testimony about a complicated moment in history, in the form of one man's searing indictment of the mistakes, his own and others, that have defined his singular time on earth. This book will endure."
Christopher Merrill
Self-Portrait with Dogwood
"There are two ways to transmute personal suffering: one is through spiritual practice; the other is through art. Tom Simmons wholeheartedly chooses the latter route. In this long-awaited new collection, he dives down the rabbit hole of a life suffused in deep personal disappointment to wrest from it the brilliant shards of universal longing—and ghostly light. "With each shift," he writes, "what looks like a common life, fractured and sad, becomes an altarpiece of infinite regress... fully manifest in possibility." To accomplish this Houdini act on an altogether ordinary life (though perhaps one "more honored in the breach than in the observance") requires daring, objectivity, and a finely honed and totally unsentimental mastery of his poetic craft. In this brilliant debut (or better, reboot), Tom Simmons returns after a long absence from the writing scene to demonstrate that his early promise has indeed borne fruit. Bright, subtle, experimental, and still yearning for that unifying wholeness beneath all the random fragments, he has emerged as one of our quintessential postmodern troubadours."
Cynthia Bourgeault – The Wisdom Way of Knowing The Heart of Centering Prayer – Love Is Stronger than Death
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
2 Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight
175 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-9986404-0-2 (9780998640402)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
THOMAS SIMMONS taught for 24 years in the Department of English at the University of Iowa; in the spring of 2016 he started something new and has been writing ever since. Before that, he was an assistant and associate professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; before that, he was a doctoral student in English at the University of California, Berkeley, a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford, and a Stanford University undergraduate. His seven previous books, one of which (The Unseen Shore: Memories of a Christian Science Childhood, Beacon Press, 1991) caused some offense in Boston, may be viewed at amazon.com site listed below. He lives in Grinnell, Iowa.