What do you think?
Rate this book
Getting Here
The poems in this book range from lyrical to surrealistic, despairing to sublime. The personae range from the monstrous, to the shamanistic, to the shamelessly in love.
92 pages, Paperback
First published July 6, 2006
4 people want to read
About the author
Thomas A. Thomas
2 books32 followersThomas A. Thomas is an acclaimed poet, photographer, and editor whose work explores the intersections of memory, nature, and the human spirit. Living gratefully in the Pacific Northwest since 1981, Thomas brings a rare blend of emotional honesty and lyrical precision to his art.
His most recent collection, My Heart Is Not Asleep (MoonPath Press, 2024), a tender and courageous meditation on love, loss, and resilience in the face of Alzheimer’s, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, as have several of his individual poems since 2022. The book and his body of work have earned him nominations for Best Spiritual Literature (2025 & 2026) and recognition as a Finalist in the 2025 Washington State Book Awards.
Thomas’s poetry, photography, and videos appear widely in print and online, including MacQueen’s Quinterly, Verse Daily, Gyroscope Review, Cirque Journal, Blue Heron Review, Vox Populi, The Banyan Review, and FemAsia Magazine. His work is also featured in several anthologies, including Voices Elevated – 10 Years of the Elk River Writers Workshop, and has been translated into Spanish, Serbian, and Bengali.
A lifelong artist and advocate for creative expression, Thomas continues to illuminate the profound connections between nature, love, and the endurance of the human heart.
https://thomas-a-thomas.com/
His most recent collection, My Heart Is Not Asleep (MoonPath Press, 2024), a tender and courageous meditation on love, loss, and resilience in the face of Alzheimer’s, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, as have several of his individual poems since 2022. The book and his body of work have earned him nominations for Best Spiritual Literature (2025 & 2026) and recognition as a Finalist in the 2025 Washington State Book Awards.
Thomas’s poetry, photography, and videos appear widely in print and online, including MacQueen’s Quinterly, Verse Daily, Gyroscope Review, Cirque Journal, Blue Heron Review, Vox Populi, The Banyan Review, and FemAsia Magazine. His work is also featured in several anthologies, including Voices Elevated – 10 Years of the Elk River Writers Workshop, and has been translated into Spanish, Serbian, and Bengali.
A lifelong artist and advocate for creative expression, Thomas continues to illuminate the profound connections between nature, love, and the endurance of the human heart.
https://thomas-a-thomas.com/
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 25, 2022
Owls fly out of a mirror. Upon a ceiling a yellow dog gallops while a horse climbs into bed. Trees murmur and women travel in and out of passages with the eyes of horses, with flesh in their teeth. The poems are aware, often speaking of their own awarenesses or dismissals. When creatures look and speak as they should we are suddenly surprised.
Sleep is penetrated by blue, by sweat, by lava hissing. Night becomes a constellation, becomes dogs shifting, as the feminine floats in and out of the forest, the sea. In creatures she is discovered. In human form she is elusive though seen, felt, admired, feared, longed for.
The poet is present, or remembering, or traveling. Or having traveled, he is placing himself in some future viewed through faceted windows of the honeybee’s eye. Getting Here is continually arriving on a new horse or motorcycle or ocean tide, while flinging the reader into its voyaging throes. To recuperate, we are given moments of quiet surrender, passages of peace, and words of easeful love.
Thomas sees and writes with expansive custody of a landscape lush with imagery and mystery. This is a book of a certain unharnessed wilderness which offers up its captivating gifts upon each reading—just as though one were riding through uncharted land on a freshly colored horse each time.
Sleep is penetrated by blue, by sweat, by lava hissing. Night becomes a constellation, becomes dogs shifting, as the feminine floats in and out of the forest, the sea. In creatures she is discovered. In human form she is elusive though seen, felt, admired, feared, longed for.
The poet is present, or remembering, or traveling. Or having traveled, he is placing himself in some future viewed through faceted windows of the honeybee’s eye. Getting Here is continually arriving on a new horse or motorcycle or ocean tide, while flinging the reader into its voyaging throes. To recuperate, we are given moments of quiet surrender, passages of peace, and words of easeful love.
Thomas sees and writes with expansive custody of a landscape lush with imagery and mystery. This is a book of a certain unharnessed wilderness which offers up its captivating gifts upon each reading—just as though one were riding through uncharted land on a freshly colored horse each time.
September 30, 2021
A poetic journey of enlightening travel: from self, through self, to self.
September 20, 2023
Outstanding work from a very promising poet w the ability to connect deeply w his material and audiences.
February 11, 2023
The back of the book states “The poems in this book range from lyrical to surrealistic, despairing to sublime. the personae range from the monstrous, to the shamanistic, to the shamelessly in love.” I really can’t add anything to those truths. But I can add how the book affected me. Every poem has lyrical lines. Even the poems that I couldn’t relate to very much, contained great beauty. Thomas knows how to pick and choose his words, how to stitch them together into a different and melodious phrase.
The opening poem, Horse Dreams, reached out, grabbed me, and pulled me into a marvelous adventure of reading pleasure with the opening lines, “Because my mother rides over / the night hills of this farm,” to “The horse dreams of poets running.” to the last lines of this poem, “In the sky between a poet’s fingers, glaciers; / at night, women with horses’ eyes / leap from the fingertips.” After reading this poem three or four times, I thought perhaps I should see what the rest of the book offered. It is full of treats.
In a few pages, we are on a surreal journey with yellow leaves, a yellow dog racing on the ceiling, and a disappearing yellow horse. I found The Wren Child Dreams particularly touching. I, too, have sat up with the same child, but I was much younger, and adults still ruled my life, and had not the sympathy for the wren child I did. It is touching, and warming, to know I was not alone, though I felt it at the time.
In I swim with dogs, he writes, “…the dogs / are a sea, their smell a tide upon gently curved / hills and fields, running” The poem finishes with, “…I / run, I sing, I / swim with dogs.” To be young again. To run and sing, to howl and swim with the dogs. From swimming with dogs, he takes us on a journey to Love in Dear Stranger, Return with the last line offering not just a prayer, but a promise, “When the heart is ready, the loved one appears.”
An Autumn Beach— where “seaweed stems blow across the / flat expanses like dried umbilical cords,” and too soon to the final poem, Night Song, the final poem, a symphony of songs of the night from the unseen spirit to the owl song and dog song, to the rising of our sun and wakefulness with the “dawn song / old song.”
As I wrote this review, I went through the book, re-read several of the poems, and those lines I’d marked with fluorescent stickers. I realize this this a book that not only have I read it more than once, but it will become a night companion on by bedside table. Thomas A. Thomas is a poet of many voices, all of them melodious. I heartily recommend this book.
The opening poem, Horse Dreams, reached out, grabbed me, and pulled me into a marvelous adventure of reading pleasure with the opening lines, “Because my mother rides over / the night hills of this farm,” to “The horse dreams of poets running.” to the last lines of this poem, “In the sky between a poet’s fingers, glaciers; / at night, women with horses’ eyes / leap from the fingertips.” After reading this poem three or four times, I thought perhaps I should see what the rest of the book offered. It is full of treats.
In a few pages, we are on a surreal journey with yellow leaves, a yellow dog racing on the ceiling, and a disappearing yellow horse. I found The Wren Child Dreams particularly touching. I, too, have sat up with the same child, but I was much younger, and adults still ruled my life, and had not the sympathy for the wren child I did. It is touching, and warming, to know I was not alone, though I felt it at the time.
In I swim with dogs, he writes, “…the dogs / are a sea, their smell a tide upon gently curved / hills and fields, running” The poem finishes with, “…I / run, I sing, I / swim with dogs.” To be young again. To run and sing, to howl and swim with the dogs. From swimming with dogs, he takes us on a journey to Love in Dear Stranger, Return with the last line offering not just a prayer, but a promise, “When the heart is ready, the loved one appears.”
An Autumn Beach— where “seaweed stems blow across the / flat expanses like dried umbilical cords,” and too soon to the final poem, Night Song, the final poem, a symphony of songs of the night from the unseen spirit to the owl song and dog song, to the rising of our sun and wakefulness with the “dawn song / old song.”
As I wrote this review, I went through the book, re-read several of the poems, and those lines I’d marked with fluorescent stickers. I realize this this a book that not only have I read it more than once, but it will become a night companion on by bedside table. Thomas A. Thomas is a poet of many voices, all of them melodious. I heartily recommend this book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews