I’m thinking about the times I’ve seen Thomas Holton perform his poetry. I’ve been lucky enough to see him a handful of times on various open mic and literary stages around the city, but I think perform might be the wrong word. Some poets perform; Thomas shares. He always insists on sitting–he pulls up a chair and pulls the microphone down to his level. He reads with the air of a poet alone in his room, composing just for himself, without concern yet for an audience. He’s careful, quiet, without affected emotion. Yet, when he reads, I feel the whole room pull in closer.
Warm Numb, Jagged Spiral, Hey Teddy, Thomas Holton’s debut collection, retains Holton’s characteristic combination of intimacy and gravitas. The collection features an accompanying short film that shares the collection's title. The film is well worth a watch, not for what it explains, but for how it adds mystery to and complements the atmosphere of Holton’s poetry. The collection harbors a sensibility most accurately described as that special ambience one feels when sitting around a campfire with friends; after a few beers have been passed and the night grows colder and darker around you. When your friends around the fire gain the wisdom of philosophers and the vulnerability of children. Wisdom and naivety, experience and youth, go hand-in-hand in the collection. One is hardly ever without the other.
The poems sometimes read like a series of dreams and night terrors told in confidence. Disjointed images are tossed in the air and gently let go—a jellyfish-laden sky, a dead rat turned to chewing gum, spinal fluid where tears should be, a narrator retreating into a crab shell decorated with shining LEDs. Among these images, the narrator speaks to an interlocutor referred to as “Teddy.” We, the readers, are pulled into their intimacy, as if we’ve always been there. This is perhaps the collection’s most charming aspect—the assumption of care, understanding, and sympathy that lies beneath the poems’ gaps and omissions. Cycling through death and rebirth, the beating heart of the collection is a preoccupation with remembrance: “when I am gone, welcome me in my absence.” Everything is already over; everything is already gone. But, as the opening poem, “The Night Before my New Life” declares “the best things in life echo.” Beautiful beginnings, these poems teach us, are nested within decline.
Warm Numb, Jagged Spiral, Hey Teddy will be released April 8, through Copper Canyon Press.
Did you enjoy this post? Please consider supporting Third Coast Review’s arts and culture coverage by making a donation. Choose the amount that works best for you, and know how much we appreciate your support!
