The Rediscovered Beauty Room
The Rediscovered Beauty Room
Jeffrey Thomson
"These rich, layered poems present us the world, and then surprise us with a world beyond that world. A simple journey by ferry to a dockside restaurant mirrors the journey of Orpheus; a runner in the 2013 Boston Marathon shadows his earliest Greek counterpart; the poet’s self-portrait reveals Charles Mingus playing the Sesame Street theme. Musical, sensual, deeply invested in the natural world, Rediscovered Beauty Room is a beauty for any reader to discover."
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs
May 2027
ISBN: 9781967149971
Available in both print and digital formats.
Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor; and the author of ten books including Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory, Half/Life: New and Selected Poems, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and Birdwatching in Wartime. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Center at Queens University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.
Additional Praise:
"Jeffrey Thomson’s new poems are pilgrimages, journeys toward the sacred instants within secular days. Like St. Francis, one of this book’s presiding spirits, Thomson finds kinship with the elements and entities around him, whether they be “[p]asqueflower,/ rattlesnake master, [and] sedge/ flattened into crystal” after an ice storm, or the enormous “night brittle/and brilliant with stars.” Devotion in a long marriage; vigils for aging elders; the sharp, unexpected blessing of afternoon gone numinous with a shift in the clouds as “sunlight/ dives through/ that sudden hole/ it’s been searching for”: in these poems, Thomson captures gorgeous, ephemeral moments where the quotidian achieves the radiance of the holy."
—Penelope Pelizzon, author of A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye
"'The world is like this:' Thomson opens one of these articulate and capacious poems, and this collection, again and again, lives up to that assertion. Here are poems that span the breadth of Western history in order to come back to what matters now, and always. They remind us why we read poetry in the first place."
—Christian Barter, author of The Ends
More by R. A. Villanueva:
Featured:
Jeffrey Thomson
“Poetry that weaves history, mythology, science, music, geography—and more—into finely wrought tropes that re-contextualize our humanity. Poetry that deconstructs and reconceives. Poetry of such stark tenderness that the ear is arrested by the urgency of every line. Poetry that laments and replenishes. Poetry that is both private and public, oracular and intimate, personal, and universal. Poetry that ruptures and mends. Poetry that speaks to the continuum of the human experience across time, space, and the page. That’s the poetry of Jeffrey Thomson.”
—Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet and author of How to Love a Country.
October 2019
ISBN: 9781948579049