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ABOUT Thomas Whitbread Thomas Whitbread was born in 1931. He attended Amherst College (B.A., ‘52) and Harvard University (Ph.D., ‘59). Since 1959 he has taught English courses, chiefly in 20th Century Poetry and Creative Writing, at the University of Texas at Austin. His previous books of poetry are Four Infinitives (Harper & Row, 1964) and Whomp and Moonshiver (BOA Editions, 1982). The first book won, the second co-won, the annual Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. A short story, “The Rememberer,” won the third Aga Khan Award, given by The Paris Review, and was reprinted in Prize Stories 1962: The O. Henry Awards. His poems and stories have appeared in twenty anthologies and numerous journals, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Texas Observer, Shenandoah, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Borderlands and Poetry Northwest. He has long loved railroads, and still tries to count cars when he sees a train on VW vacation drives throughout the contiguous United States. His favorite places include western North Carolina, the Oregon coast, the Uncompahgre River valley of Colorado at Ridgway and Cape Cod. | |||||||||
The Structures Minds Erect $15.00 ISBN: 978-1-931247-24-5 “These are poems as we’d forgotten poems could be, intricately formed, tightly woven, reminiscent of Donne and Wilbur in naturalness and craft. Whitbread jitterbugs, jazzes, and slow dances in iambic pentameter, astonishes with wit and self-deprecating wisdom. His language strikes out and turns back on itself in curlicues of ambiguity. These virtuoso performances are clearly “ink spent in the paper’s love”; however, the love that most informs these pages is that of people in all their knotty imperfection. Of friends, he writes, “They give you the help and love you need to live.” Poems do the same, especially ones like these. What Whitbread says of Georgia O’Keeffe might well apply to his own work: ‘Art is love.’” “Would that I were a line in a Whitbread poem! And were I, Unwary Reader, my Woo, I would sally through your house in skimp-and-pithy skirts (Better to flip than flip out). I would pursue you with my true-ness (Why could we not instead live unstupid lives). My rue would swoon you (The sorrow geysers up). My ruminations would woe you (We die). I would groan to you (I am gullet-tired/ Of inaccuracies). I would unfold to you (Yet one in a thousand lusts may turn to love). But above All Else I would be known to you (Our poems are our ends).”
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Plymouth, England, 1967 The rubbling of Plymouth by the Nazi blitz |
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