In Matt Thomas\u2019s poetry things are rarely what they seem. Thomas is a visual artist as well as a poet and he brings both a sensitivity to appearances, and a visual sensibility, to his modern lyricism. The title of this collection brings to mind Raymond Carver and, like Carver, Thomas pokes around in the margins of the ordinary, the trivial and seemingly inconsequential. Ordinary things, stray memories, items of clothing, leaves awash in the gutter, domestic details, a train ride, capture his attention and he turns these observations into illuminations of what lies behind the day-to-day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSilk shirt\u201d, for example, is about a silk shirt only insofar as the shirt he is wearing provokes a memory about another item of clothing, \u201ca sharkskin, \/ ten dollar, \/ Detroit suit\u201d he wore as a youth. He tells us this suit is the only one \u201cI ever looked good in\u201d and immediately we shift to different territory: memory, yes; a specific memory, for sure; but also, a more general sense of time passing, of things lost, of things getting \u201cout of hand\u201d. We age, gain weight, lose hair and today\u2019s silk shirts, however natty, can never make us look that good again: that old, sharkskin suit simply doesn\u2019t suit anymore. Thomas shows us how this stuff, the stuff that surrounds us, can alienate, can suffocate, can make us \u201cfeel \/ tired, heavy, encased\u201d as he puts it in another poem. Look at that word, \u201cencased\u201d, feel its weight, its root, its direction of travel, its intimation of mortality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s a man going to do? Why, he just gets on with it! Because what we have here is not a lame nostalgia for a past that never really was in the first place; nor is this a sullen morbidity, but a way of treating the quotidian as a bed of discovery. This is a poetry of maturity, not a bleating confessional. The memories, the things, the mundane events, are significant precisely because they point to what is really going on, now. If only we would learn how to look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In \u201cTansy\u201d, the smell of that yellow flower, held in the hand of an unnamed companion, is \u201ca stink\u201d which, with the colour, evokes an older yellow of a grandmother\u2019s upholstery, \u201cyellow with experience \/ a sweet, almost rotten smell \/ meat \/ piss \/ and a little bit of something else.\u201d And here, as the edges of memory blur, the upholstery becomes a personification of old age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s yellow again, in the next stanza: \u201ca yellow top\u201d the companion may, or may not, have been wearing at the time, shines a reflective light on the previous, unpromising material. The smelly flowers, dank yellow upholstery, rot, meat and piss, are revealed as a kind of conceit whereby a different, altogether brighter poem emerges, one in which the narrator, by virtue of the companion\u2019s presence, \u201cmight look back \/ on any one of those moments \u2026 and call it love \/ at first sight\u201d. It is a love poem, then, with antecedents that can be traced back to Donne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In \u201cTrain\u201d, the poet sits \u201cfacing the wrong way\u201d and watches \u201cthe world recede \/ from us like a wake\u201d. He checks his Twitter account \u201cjust in case\u201d. His companion faces \u201cthe right way\u201d and watches \u201cthe world become\u201d. This is clever and turns an ordinary train journey, with its litter, detritus, boredom and daydreaming, into a meditation on beginnings and endings, on time, on death. But it is not merely clever: it\u2019s insistent. It insists on attention and when it inevitably bursts in through a Tweet – \u201cMichael K Williams has died\u201d \u2013 our travellers are forced to muse on the world\u2019s cruelty – it is \u201cbrutal and some people are not \/ meant for it\u201d \u2013 even as the train rattles through the bucolic, picture-book scenery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is poetry measured, distilled and controlled by a fine intelligence. Metaphor is used but little, always judiciously, and is never allowed to cloud observation. There is always more going on than meets even this poet\u2019s sharp eye. He knows it, and his skill lies in peeling back the layers to reveal it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Matt Thomas\u2019s poetry things are rarely what they seem. Thomas is a visual artist as well as a poet and he brings both a sensitivity to appearances, and a visual sensibility, to his modern lyricism. The title of this collection brings to mind Raymond Carver and, like Carver, Thomas pokes around in the margins […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","class_list":["post-189","review","type-review","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":{"author":[179]},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shoalsofstarlings.com\/shoalsofstarlingspress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shoalsofstarlings.com\/shoalsofstarlingspress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shoalsofstarlings.com\/shoalsofstarlingspress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shoalsofstarlings.com\/shoalsofstarlingspress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book-author\/179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shoalsofstarlings.com\/shoalsofstarlingspress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}