Sally Thomas, Motherland

Motherland

Sally Thomas

Able Muse Press 

Paperback / softback

ISBN: 978-1-77349-043-4

Digital Formats: Amazon Kindle | Barnes & Noble NOOK 

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Publication Date: May 29, 2020

Page Count: 126 Pages

Publisher's Note: 

In Sally Thomas’s Motherland, the poet keenly observes the ephemeral and the everlasting in the lens of time—the daily into seasonal transformations, the gifts and wonders of nature and people. Motherland by turns hails and interrogates in matters of flesh, of faith and spirituality—especially so in the “Richeldis of Walsingham” poem sequence. This finalist in the Able Muse Book Award is a collection abounding in insight, hope, grace, surprises, and yes, love.

Praise for Motherland: 

A core of spiritual knowledge resides in the poems of Sally Thomas’s Motherland— knowledge that might seem strange to the poet herself, in fact, though it definitely resides in her, and radiates throughout this collection. Motherland is the perfect title, since the poet, herself a mother, regards all her human occupations as native and yet mysterious, occurring in a place which is both foreign and familiar.  The final sequence, on Richeldis of Walsingham, includes lines that describe the expression of that knowledge, as “the eloquence/ Of the small river moving always forward to the unseen/ Sea.” Motherland is a book of the presence—radiant, benevolent, challenging—for which there is often no word, except as we find in poetry, like the poetry of Sally Thomas.” —Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry

The poems of Sally Thomas are poems in which the act of looking at the world in all its depth and complexity is just about as close as possible to being fully realized in the corresponding “world” of poetic language and form. And the verses are compelling because in every line something is at stake: our very understanding of creation, the human condition, and the mystery of thought and its language that link us, however imperfectly, to what may be called the given world. As Thomas says in “Frost,” “Tricky winter light and my own eye/ Bend the world, if not to beauty, then/ To strangeness.”

  —David Middleton (from the foreword), author of The Fiddler of Driskill Hill

In her most recent collection of poems, Motherland, Sally Thomas gives us a world we live in but, alas, too often don’t seem to see. So much is lost, these poems tell us, even as they manage to reinstate and re-imagine these losses for us. All poetry is elegiac, even as it can, in the hands of a serious poet, celebrate the very world which for all of us keeps slipping away in the great wheel of time. Then too there is her mastery of poetic form—among these the sonnet, the villanelle, the couplet, and her unparalleled command of rhyme and slant rhyme. What a delight to discover a poet who has found a way to allow the sacred and the sacramental inform her poems in a surprising range of contemporary idioms.

  —Paul Mariani, author of Epitaphs for the Journey

Three poems

Corbett, "Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter"

Maryann Corbett, Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter

Able Muse Press, 102 pp.

Maryann Corbett’s second full-length collection, Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, draws on profound experience of deep winter in the lived environment, while keeping alive faith that the thaw will come and bring with it the bloom of “uncountable rows of petals.” The themes of this finalist for the 2011 Able Muse Book Award range from the quotidian to the metaphysical. Corbett’s keen eye brings to focus uncommon detail. Her masterful technical repertoire spans received forms, metrical inventiveness, and free verse. This is poetry that amply rewards the reader with its boundless imagination, insight and visionary delight.

Poems from Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter have been featured on Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and at The Poetry Foundation website.

Praise for Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter:

“What makes Maryann Corbett such a rare, excellent writer must be her talent for weaving together various artistic impulses, so that her poems often sound both traditional and brand new, both humorous and serious, both worldly-wise and, as John Keats once put it, “capable of being in uncertainties.” [She] remains a poet of the first order, and her poems are cause for gratitude, and deep enjoyment.”
—Peter Campion (from the foreword)

“...full of real gems!”

—Gail White

“Corbett is as comfortable and affecting within the tight confines of the Old English alliterative meter (“Cold Case”) and the Sapphic stanza (“Paint Store”) as she is with her supple blank verse and terza rima. Yet never does her rigorous craft interfere with the thoughtful, insightful content of these poems. A stunning collection, from one of America’s most gifted contemporary poets.”
—Marilyn L. Taylor

“I am mightily impressed by the perfect imagery of the title poem, the just-right form of the moving “Ballade for the Last Move,” and much more.”
—Jean Kreiling

“Sharply visual, skillfully and cleverly crafted, her poems draw out essences, ‘concentrated’ and persisting. ‘Beauty changes us,/ calling up wonder from our deepest selves/ to its right place.’”
—Catharine Savage Brosman

“These masterful poems announce themselves as winter pieces, and indeed they are so full of sleet and snow that readers may wish to dress warmly. But Corbett’s winter, a season when “dull forms come in the mail” and we eat “tasteless, stone-hard, gassed tomatoes,” is always lushly haunted by the other seasons, the way a house in one of her poems is fronted by a “three-season porch.” Corbett is one of the best-kept secrets of American poetry, and this is one of the best new collections I’ve read in years.”
—Geoffrey Brock

“...a newborn Robert Frost, with a wicked eye for contemporary life. Each poem surprises.”

—Willis Barnstone

Credo at Verse Daily: http://www.versedaily.org/2013/chiller.shtml

Credo at American Life in Poetry: http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/columns/457.html

Credo at Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/maryann-corbett

About the author:

Maryann Corbett grew up in McLean, Virginia, and now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and works for the Minnesota Legislature. Trained as a medievalist and linguist, she holds a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota.

Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Rattle, River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Dark Horse, Mezzo Cammin, Linebreak, Subtropics, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, and many other venues in print and online, as well as the anthologies Hot Sonnets, The Able Muse Anthology, The Best of The Barefoot Muse, Forgetting Home: Poems About Alzheimer's, Ekphrastia Gone Wild, Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature, and Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century.

Her books are Breath Control (David Robert Books), Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, a finalist for the Able Muse Book Prize, and Mid Evil, winner of the Richard Wilbur Award for 2014, forthcoming from the Evansville Press.

Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter is available from the publisher or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Credo-Checkout-Line-Winter-Poems/dp/1927409144