Review of Once In a Lifetime, a poetry collection by F. Richard Thomas
ISBN: 978-0-9608802-0-1
published by Years Press
6×9 97 pages
cover design: Helen Stork
Beginning with the cover I felt the personality and humanity of Dick Thomas. Standing by his young wife, a baby slung on his hip, her arms wrapped around a second child, we see them young, burly and confident standing in front of a log cabin they have built themselves. In the poem Brown County, Indiana, Thomas makes his most poignant point considering how unfamiliar these shining young people would be with the frailties and complications of aging that the poet and his wife, Sherry, now face well into the second half-century of their lives and marriage. And we learn what these optimistic youth managed to hold on to all these years later as they shore up the autumn of their existence. It is mature writing, a mature subject, told with poignancy, humor and self-awareness – a good example of how we all can face our futures.
I Walked the Dog Today
but this time
we took a new route
and met a new dog
It was a
once in a lifetime
experience.
Dick Thomas calls himself a student of the alchemy of words and I see it so clearly with a Beatlick Joe enjoyment in the poem Logophilia: My callipygian septuagenarian. And elsewhere such enjoyable words as beef-witted, gargonized, slubberdegullion.
The reader learns who the poet is as an individual in personal poems: Chemistry, Naming the Trees in New Mexico, My Desk, in clever ways, with a knack. You can’t accuse the writer of being hackneyed.
This is a great book to read in the bed, on the deck, someplace quiet, because these poems will elicit your own memories and truths, struggles. It is told as the author says in his own final poem:
A Language
that falls in a lovely curve
from the lip of creation.
–
Review by Beatlick Pamela Hirst who can be reached at publishingpamela@yahoo.com. Pamela Hirst runs the Beatlick Press at beatlick.com.
Read more "REVIEW: ONCE IN A LIFETIME – F. Richard Thomas"
King of Carrots
As my father and his friends drilled
with their wildcat rig at the first line
of arid Sierra Nevada foothills my
young brothers and I saw a boy our
age by a great overturned silver tank
that winked in the sun near a peeling
house with wrinkled green shingles,
asphalt at their curled edges, a couple
rooms with lean-to screen porch. We
hiked into waist-high golden oats and
sharp foxtails until we found a door
cut in the dented metal. In the cooler
dark the child sat on the dirt strewn
with hundreds of orange carrots still
with feathery leaves. “Why do you
pull them up?” I asked. “You should
save them to eat.” I don’t remember
what he answered. Maybe they were
his toys or treasure, his only friends,
each yanked like a spirit from its bed
and carried to his round silent house.
He was prince of carrots, general of
an army, their god, powerful and rich
enough to let them waste. We didn’t
eat any but sat without names inside
a realm of dying vegetables, nothing
to say. We said goodbye and returned
down the hill and in my father’s truck
waited in the heat, watching the derrick,
its casing sinking into the ground, our
father’s and the others’ arms stained with
yellow drilling mud. No oil gushed and
we drove home from the solitary king
in the castle and his fallen subjects like
strange fingers his mother let him gather
and rule in doomed rings all around him.
Read more "POETRY: NELS HANSON – KING OF CARROTS"
Rocky Mountain High
I don’t remember mountains in Denver.
I mistook them for clouds steeped
in shadow, soaked in wind, hugging
the horizon, limiting the distance of
our spectacled vision. Without a car,
the road through the mountains was
something to imagine, not to travel.
I remember walking wide streets, past
empty storefronts and flickering neon cacti.
Cutting through the university quad free
of weeds and students, we talked
about books we’d read and then
ambled to Safeway and the apartment.
I remember watching Seinfeld in black
and white. We drank Crystal Pepsi,
ate toasted bagels, the frozen kind,
smaller than my fist. Cynthia drew the
smoky drapes against night’s noise, against
mountains in the distance, the future
of endless beginnings and false starts,
our late twenties, the nineteen nineties.
Paging Doctor Numbnuts
There was this drunk at the bar
many years ago
who wore a stethoscope around his neck
so everyone would think him
a doctor.
He was in rags otherwise, begging drinks in the worst way,
but always with that stupid black
stethoscope.
One day
a regular decided to screw with him
and wore a stethoscope of
his own.
The drunk drank beside him
for seven straight hours
and did not say
anything.
Then everyone wore a stethoscope,
even the bartender.
Waiting until the drunk went to the crapper
before putting them on.
When he returned
he walked about four feet
then his eyes got really
wide.
Like almonds split with a mallets.
MALPRACTICE!, he screamed,
MALPRACTICE!
MALPRACTICE!
Running out of the bar
so that everyone could share the same
dumb laughter
for once.
Don’t Try To Escape
The empty beer glasses remind me
to take a break from this conversation
I’m having on the nature of impulse
with this girl I didn’t think had it in her.
I stand up, find out I’m drunker
than I thought I was, more open
to this environment
I thought wasn’t for me.
“Not divey enough,” I had said.
“Too many artsy fartsy types.”
New emptiness is being met by the band
playing that familiar song, this feeling
the bartender’s mustache is my own
and I like it, despite the joke I made
to Jack when we walked in.
I think I might have been
bullying myself.
Everything is becoming
too sentimental.
I think I might puke,
so I resolve to slowly kill myself
with a cigarette and some air.
I take my place
by one of those cigarette dispensers,
which I suspect has no need
for the process of emptying and refilling
because around it
there must be a hundred or more
cigarette butts becoming one
with the communist grass.
Two Roses
leaning against a gravestone.
Tattered twin soldiers of past
lives surpassed. Blackened
by the brush of sun’s many fingers,
they cling to each other, refusing to relinquish
their kiss. Their memory
lingers like petals yet to be plucked
by the wind.
Read more "POETRY: A.J. HUFFMAN – Two Roses"
Cacti Fur 