Amazing Grace: Poems

Amazing Grace received the 2003 Western Heritage Award (Poetry Category) from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

Amazing Grace received the prestigious 2003 Western Heritage Award (poetry category) from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

The sixty-four poems in this collection, the second book from up-and-coming Texas poet Larry D. Thomas, probe the complex interrelations between the land and the creatures that inhabit it. The book won the 2001 Texas Review Poetry Prize and it is easy to see why these lean, sharp-edged poems were selected by the judges. Geographically and thematically, Amazing Grace encompasses all that is integral to Texas and Texans, while at the same time transcending the merely regional to explore universal human truths.The collection is divided into four sections, each of which anatomizes a particular region of the state. The first quarter of the book, Their Heaven of Bleakness, is set in West Texas. It is the most tightly-knit of the four sections. Opening with a poem entitled "`Of Dust Thou Art'" and closing with "`And to Dust Thou Shalt Return,'" these twenty pieces are linked by interwoven themes of living and dying-the springing from the soil of life, death's return to the land, the miracle of rebirth from earth's dark womb-and by the ever-present tie between the dry West Texas country and its drought-resistant denizens. The imagery of these powerful lyric poems is as rugged as the Guadalupe Mountains and their language cuts like a blue norther, bone-deep. Here be turkey vultures, rattlesnakes, claret cup cactus, cattle, and above all an unconquerable people who "take to their gritty beds, / ease the quilts of grandmas / over their leathery bodies / like slabs of red earth, and they pray." The setting for the second quarter of the collection, Near the Big Thicket, moves east across the Balcones Escarpment into the shadow of the Piney Woods. The dark shadows of the pines are echoed in these twenty pieces by a deeper darkness that underlies so much of the human experience. In "The Slough," Thomas interweaves concrete natural imagery of death's rank decay with the figurative putrefaction of original sin so that the poem becomes an extended metaphor whose vehicle is the dark bayou and whose tenor is the human condition. The viewpoint character of the piece "can hear / the muffled steady engine of its rot" as the slough "works its timeless wonders / under still, dark waters. Its film / has already claimed his pale, blue eyes."In the third quarter of the collection, At the Jetty's End, Thomas revisits the Gulf coast that he portrayed with such poignancy in his debut collection, The Lighthouse Keeper (Timberline Press 2001). The ten pieces in this section are filled with a tone of longing that contrasts nicely with the dark tone of the poems in section two. The land-dwelling speakers and viewpoint characters of these bittersweet lyrics seek with varying degrees of success to merge themselves with the sea. "Mooring Line," a piece reprinted from Thomas's debut collection, addresses the difficulty of making this connection-and its tenuousness once the connection is achieved. The controlling image of the poem, the mooring line of the title, lies hal