Amazing Grace

Larry Thomas's Amazing Grace is Texas in poetry but speaks, as fine poetry does, to more than just Texas. Just as Georgia O'Keeffe's starkly beautiful paintings of the Palo Duro Canyon speak to a myriad of audiences, Thomas's poems, set among the land, cattle, and people living in the stark and often dangerous beauty of various parts of Texas, speak to the human condition, not simply the Texas condition.
Thomas takes us into the Big Thicket, to the coast, and to the borderlands in stark scenes of transcendent beauty with some slight terror undergirding everything. In writing of a hawk in the "Near The Big Thicket" section of Amazing Grace, Thomas feels "the brutal cold, with nothing but the hooded, / Brooding terror of his presence." "Amazing Grace" is the eponymous poem of this fine collection and it is a poem about a remarkable woman who lives on the land, preferring it to the city. Old at this stage in her life, approaching death, "she still rises before the light...." And it is a palpable "warm, amber light / savory as the brandy of aged literature / swirling in the snifter of her skull." This is the "amazing" grace of Larry Thomas' verse: beautifully written, cohesive, marking the danger in the beauty; the redemptive grace that comes from both the small terrors and the great beauty of the land. This is a wonderful collection and Thomas is a poet you will not want to miss.
—H. Palmer Hall, author of From the Periphery: Poems and EssaysandDeep Thicket & Still Waters