Place Published: Braddock, PA
Publisher: Braddock Avenue Books
Date Published: 2022
ISBN: 9798985725636

Synopsis:

Praise for Remembrance

Thurmond’s poems of personal loss move us by implying a shared vulnerability. They also square up quietly to the imponderable impact of death and how it impresses irreversibly lost opportunities. He melds “poetic” language with the colloquial to suggest the elusiveness of experience, as if words will always fall short. He’s also adept at colouring emotion with vivid, atmospheric natural settings and allusion to mythology, and neither feels out of place or proportion in the narrative. Admirable, too, is his skill in choice and exploitation of several forms, never obtrusively and always reinforcing the tone and mood of what’s conveyed. He uses sonnet form with equal dexterity to depict a tennis comedy and a painful Mother’s Day reminiscence. If there’s philosophising, it’s never left as an abstraction, and he can confront grim and confusing memories in gritty, mundane language. 

Such promise in a chapbook suggests we can look forward to a rich and varied full collection.
—Michael Tolkien, author of Exposures: New and Selected Poems

 

If you want a poet who understands the human spirit, the power of love and loss and renewal, then F.H. Thurmond is the poet for you. If you want the lyric concrete as a mother’s yellow roses blooming years after she has gone, or a lost brother’s pandemic mask, or a tennis racket’s “ping of perfect pitch”, then Thurmond’s verse of precise and sensual imagery should fulfill you. His chapbook shines with all this and more. 
—Roger Armbrust, poet and author of Go Deep. Take Chances: Embracing the Muse and Creative Writing