Thomas Reiter
Thomas Reiter has published five full-length books of poetry, the most recent being Catchment, LSU Press, 2009. He has been awarded the Daily News Poetry Prize from The Caribbean Writer and the Boatwright Poetry Prize from Shenandoah. He is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Monmouth University, where he held the Wayne D. McMurray Endowed Chair in the Humanities.
Reading List
This Train
This train is bound for glory, this train . . . comes in the voices of fellowship from the Holiness Refuge Tabernacle on the Hill. Rooted in a road-side gully, a salt-loving wild morning glory has set out bearing crimson …
Egg Island Almanac (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017)
Page by page Egg Island Almanac, the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s Open Competition winner for 2017, brings to mind a statement by Wendell Berry in Standing by Words, a perspective combining ethics and poetics: “We are speaking …
St. Gwynfed’s Parishioner
I’m John Colwin and I call Saint Gwynfed’s my parish. No tithing. No minister fashioning pulpit phrases for the pound’s sake. My theology’s all with the bards of Holyhead Town, those guardians of Welsh lore. Some lines I have by …
THE AIR’S ACCOMPLICES (LSU, 2015) by Brendan Galvin
In Biophilia, his grand work on the stewardship of environment, Edward O. Wilson has famously said, “Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of …
Everlasting
Dry October, the shallows move across briary ground so lightly, slowly, there are cloud flowers on the bedrock. On the stream bank, lichen the color of litmus leafs out on stones, and in that tough company here’s the pearly everlasting, …
Witness Tree, Culp’s Hill, Gettysburg
For my grandson “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.” — Herman Melville Monument by monument we’ve found the site. You’re wearing an officer’s plumed hat chosen from shelves of replicas, and over one shoulder an enlisted man’s …
Margaret Miller in the Williamette Valley, Oregon, 1858
My husband said I was unsexing myself, and soon I’d have a voice hard as hailstones. Yet when did I ever fail to spread my skirt to curtain off a female and protect her modesty? He believed I shamed him …
Pruning the Back Boundary
After reaching down and delivering spring’s terminal clusters, a whiteness mixing citrus and jasmine whenever we opened the back door, our mock-orange bushes have let fall their thumbnail blossoms, leaving seed capsules in their pale green starbursts. A display of …