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FHP
FORT HEMLOCK PRESS
www.FortHemlockPress.com
“Stickiness, memorability, is one sign of a good poem. You hear it and a day later some of it is still there in the brainpan.” —Garrison Keillor
Available now from FHP:
“Thomas Moore is a poet of luminous clarity. He records the subtle beauty of the physical world in language that is vivid and exact. The Bolt-Cutters also gives us a sense of the inner man as he moves through worlds of work, loss, life changes, sweat and celebration.
This poet knows New England, knows the land from working on and with it. He has also traveled in far places like Turkey and Greece, as well as in their history and art.
Like the students in one poem who suddenly wake up to Robert Frost, ‘and ask to hear the poem again, slower please,’ readers of Thomas Moore will want to linger in these poems, which give us the whole complex sweet-sad world, palpable and richly textured.”
--Betsy Sholl, Maine Poet Laureate
“A lot of the themes, imagery and shape of the language in “The Bolt-Cutters” are available in other well-wrought books of contemporary verse. But what sets this collection apart is that practically every poem provides a forceful emotional jolt. A lot of our postwar poetry is so subdued in tone and diction that it severely understates its emotional content and the emotions often disappear from the reading experience; but Tom Moore’s poems evoke strong, finely developed feelings with startling clarity.”
-- Dana Wilde, Bangor Daily News, 1/24/11
To order The Bolt-Cutters send a check for $12.50 ($10.00 plus $2.50 for mailing; Maine residents add 50 cents for sales tax) to Fort Hemlock Press, P.O. Box 11, Brooksville, ME 04617.
EMAIL CONTACT: FortHemlockPress@gmail.com
The Bolt-Cutters was a Finalist in the 2011 Maine Literary Awards competition. “The Plymouth on Ice” and “At the Berkeley Free Speech Café” were featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac in January 2011.
“Calving in Te Awamutu” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
CALVING IN TE AWAMUTU
When the heifers were birthing and it was after midnight raining and bitter and winter in July, when the thick gorse at the paddock edges shimmered in the flashlight’s beam and the ditches were deep mud and our raingear crackled as we searched for the cows, when the calves, minutes old, shivered on legs learning ground, learning grass and the mothers licked their sticky skins with barnacle tongues, when the blankets we threw on the backs of the mothers were heavy and wet and we too shivered like the calves, when a calf strangled in the womb and I reached inside as far as my shoulder to cut apart the dead calf with the serrated wire sawing back and forth, back and forth to save the mother, when we took the calves away and led the first-time milkers to the long shed and they bolted and stamped and fought at the stanchions and we attached the suction to their teats and the milk flowed warm and smoking into the cooler, when the bullocks were fenced by the road to be sold to the knacker, when we sat in the farmhouse for breakfast of lamb chops and tea, when we forked pungent silage onto the wagon behind the blue diesel tractor and forked it again into the paddocks for feed, when the rain at last stopped and we stood on the empty wagon rolling cigarettes of New Zealand tobacco, the morning sun was warm and all nature steamed.
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Thomas
R. Moore’s poems have appeared in Worcester Review,
College English, Boston Literary Magazine, Wolf Moon Journal,