Michael W. Thomas, "A Time for Such a Word"

 

Michael W. Thomas’s latest poetry collection is A Time for Such a Word (Black Pear Press). His latest novel is The Erkeley Shadows (KDP / Swan Village Reporter). He has published nine poetry collections, two collections of short fiction and three novels. His work has appeared in, among others, The  Antigonish Review (Canada), The Antioch Review (US), Critical Survey, The London Magazine, Pennine Platform, the TLS and Under the Radar. He is on the editorial board of Crossroads: A Journal of English Studies (University of Bialystok, Poland). From 2004 to 2009, he was poet-in-residence at the Robert Frost Festival, Key West, Florida. He contains no (well, few) additives. His website is here. His blog is The Swan Village Reporter.

About A Time for Such a Word
"A time for such a word" is taken from Macbeth, which might suggest an attempt to doom this collection from the start. True, there are dark corners here and there, but they exist for good reasons and are most carefully explored. And there is also much light and hopefulness. Visiting different points of time and space—now a desert island at dusk, now a log-store with an out-of-season moth, now Grenada, now a suburban house as it unbuilds itself—Thomas’s speakers reflect, speculate, even reanimate what seems valueless, a lost cause, a scene of no account.  The collection’s final line is "You’re alright, you, you’re alright." Now quietly, now emphatically, A Time for Such a Word insists that the world might just be so. 

You can read more about A Time for Such a Word on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From A Time for Such a Word, by Michael W. Thomas

The Orphans of Midsomer

          

          (Midsomer Murders, ITV, 1997 onwards) 

And every so often

a young person stares unseeing

over and around the last five minutes.

The Inspector pats their shoulder,

the DS gives a smile his heart

can’t really afford, because already the next case

is among the foliage, the credits are antsy

at the foot of the screen.  Doors must slam.  

The unmarked car must drive 

into this time next week.

So the young person

without so much as a neighbourly hug

is left to stand outside what they’re stuck with:

a cottage in which the odours have to stoop,

a mansion where the chill huddles into itself

at corniced junctions – 

Death’s pay in kind, there being no other family,

not truly, mum or dad having hooked it

before the episode began,

the other one having been fed to the plot,

even unmasked as the murderer

brewing more grudges than all the hot dinners

touted in the breaks.

A proper wrong ‘un

will always fight the glove

that seeks to pilot their head

through the squad-car’s rear door.

So it is now, before the orphan’s unmendable heart.

The DS and Inspector

will make off through ending’s dusk,

fade in step with their tail-plate.

The supporting cast will tumble

into the run-off down the sides of the script.

Only the orphan remains and is real,

standing before a house whose secrets

will never now stop yakking.

Maybe they’ll pray for their own tomorrow

(though veiled as yet by that fight of names,

key grip, location bod, gaffer…) – 

even tell themselves they can almost see it,

like a hometown glimpsed as a train slows,

half-melted in an indifference of rain.

 

Yes

A blackbird stands on a branch

above where philadelphus

makes the path feel less alone.

It’s the moment when day

starts threading down hand over hand,

stuck about with the odd small glory.

The bird sings the whole mad run of the world

to the second it opened its beak.

War and pleasure bubble in its notes.

Late rain clicks at the greenhouse

as though an irradiated man hides there

and the elements baulk at his wormy blood.

And now a plastic bag

cartwheels past the gate to the lane.  

The blackbird sees off its tale of the hour just gone

and flies.  Imagine them rising together

wet with the first tears of night,

making for what doesn’t know it will be dawn.

Imagine the bird dropping notes into the bag

like unstrung pearls with no floor for their skitter.

Imagine the bag as a singing moon…

…till they swerve apart,

the bird to rise on,

the bag to cascade the knockings of a song

that someone might assemble as they wear against the dark

and try through once or twice…and find

a yes, small and improbable, itching at their heart.

Michael W. Thomas, "Sing Ho! Stout Cortez: Novellas and Stories"

Michael W. Thomas is the author of eight poetry collections, two short fiction collections and two novels. His latest poetry collection is Under Smoky Light (Offa's Press, 2020); his latest fiction collection is Sing Ho! Stout Cortez: Novellas and Stories (Black Pear Press, 2021). His work has appeared in The Antigonish Review (Canada), The Antioch Review (US), Critical Survey, Crossroads (Poland), Etchings (Australia), Irish Studies Review, Irish University Review, Magazine Six (US), the TLS and Under the Radar, among others. For many years he was poet-in-residence at the Robert Frost Festival, Key West, Florida. He has just completed a new novel, Nowherian, the memoir of a Grenadian exile's time in England.

About Sing Ho! Stout Cortez: Novellas and Stories 

A Grenadian exile in England receives distressing word about an old friend, a much-troubled troubadour. Thumbing through a photo album, a woman is ambushed by long-forgotten horrors. Hernán Cortés and Grace O’Malley, conquistador and pirate queen, grant a builders-yard labourer an hour of improbable glory. A young schoolboy, victim of incipient abuse, steals the family car and drives into December darkness. In the novellas and stories that make up Sing Ho! Stout Cortez, Michael W. Thomas gives eloquent voice to time and chance. Old and young, his characters confront life-changing moments. More, they make fresh discoveries about themselves, act in ways they would never have imagined, reshape their destinies or embrace whatever fate has in store. From big picture to the smallest detail, these are compelling journeys through lives and places, studies of the human heart in all its richness.

Speaking of the collection, Michael says: "All of these pieces were written within the last four years, aside from Esp, which was shortlisted for the UK Novella Award, 2015, and which enlarges on the experiences of Henderson Bray, first encountered in 'Misshapes from Cadbury’s' in my story collection, The Portswick Imp. An early working title for the present collection was Timely Voices. What seemed to unite the pieces here was the sense that, in each, the narrator or main character works towards (or stumbles upon) a crucial time in their life: a time to discover, confront, act or somehow honour a long-standing rendezvous with something—a feeling, a nugget of knowledge—whose importance can no longer be dodged.  I think that such a theme still holds good. Reading through the pieces again, however, I’m also struck by another one: escape from current circumstance. In some pieces, characters literally do just that (all hail to the car and the open road). Of course, once a story ends, it’s lights out and curtain. But it’s been observed that every exit becomes an entrance elsewhere. So I can only hope that, however these characters act, whatever prompts their changes or departures, they will find what they’re looking for (or something as near as makes, in the end, no difference)."   

You can see more details about Sing Ho! Stout Cortez on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample from the book. 

From Sing Ho! Stout Cortez, by Michael W. Thomas

Extract from Esp: The Voice of Grenada: A Novella

Henderson Bray, a Grenadian working for a year at a care centre in the English Midlands, receives a letter about an old school-friend, Esp, a wayward troubadour and troubled soul.  The letter transports Henderson back to his early years: particularly, to Esp’s rise as self-styled Voice of Grenada ...

When he wasn’t enraging Restless Headey, our unspeakable English teacher, Esp was into the guitar. He got pretty good, too. His favourite players came from all over. But there was no face among them from any Caribbean island, no Dwight Pinkney, no Fitzroy Coleman or Flores Chaviano. His heroes came from lands where, we thought, folk had permanent colds or got moved on by the cops for looking like that instead of this; then, too, they were coeval with our older brothers, our youngest dads, which made them even mistier.  Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix tussled for Esp’s golden crown, though they got shunted off at times in favour of, say, Pete Townshend’s windmill arm or the precise snap of Mark Knopfler. And he went yet further, in time and oddity. My Uncle Padmore, a limited but flamboyant picker himself, got wind of Esp’s doings and dug out a cassette of Les Paul and Mary Ford whose quality spoke of a mike prodded against a mono-speaker:

‘Pass him this.  “How High The Moon,”  boy. One listen and he’ll be flying there.’

He was right.  Their take on the song enraptured Esp—the whole swamp-toned album did.  He saw a giddying challenge in Les Paul’s multi-track wizardry.  Clapton and the rest were great, no doubt of it, but they played one guitar. There were times when they defied it, outraged it, melted it, but it was still just a single thing in their hands. This Les Paul, said Esp ... and his wonderment would stream out in a long whistle. He became the pioneer’s gospeller. 

The business of reproducing what Les Paul had wrought with miles of tape—who knows, even cried over, while Mary supplied beer and handkerchiefs—didn’t faze Esp in the least. At an audition for a school show, he constructed a singular hommage to ‘How High The Moon,’ playing a tape he’d recorded of the chord progression and then—with art and elegance, the rest of us thought—playing the same progression live but with a sweetly-timed delay to catch something of the original’s fat echoes. Now and then he threw in mouth-guitar, a line of juvva-da-juv juvs which jostled sparkily with the live chords ...