To the Archaeologist Who Finds Us, Poems by Gary Thompson

Gary Thompson’s graceful To the Archaeologist Who Finds Us is a treasure trove of mementos of the interior life: a gathering of lyrics that will allow the future to understand the experience of our lived life, as it is sensed and felt.

Sample Poems by Gary Thompson

“Lyrical, wry, at ease—these poems have a deep inner life. They are inhabited, not haunted, by Keats and Raymond Carver, a hesitant dead father who reaches Thompson on the telephone, by angels weathered as birds, by found loves—but always inhabited (the only test of real poetry) by the poet himself.”—Dennis Schmitz, author of The Truth Squad and About Night

“In To the Archeologist Who Finds Us, Gary Thompson works a puzzle complex enough to demand genius: How might language hold fast a life where one must so often ask, ‘for what would be the point/or use of words/at that moment, in this world.’ As simplicity in solving a scientific theorem is called elegance, it’s the spare, sword-edge precision of line and diction that shimmers in this wonderful book. Don’t be lulled by the casual tone of these poems into thinking simplicity means easy. In Thompson’s construct the actual, with its difficult details, is grace; the natural, not the supernatural, offers meaning: ‘Any angel you hold/yourself up to must be avian,/with wings so weathered, so laced/with loss, that you would rise…over the gray/Pacific, never dreaming of heaven.’ Let’s hope the archaeologist who finds us finds this book—he will hold our kind with more compassion, believe us more good-hearted than we might otherwise appear.”—Joanne Allred, author of Particulate

Gary Thompson’s poems have been published in a wide range of magazines, from American Poetry Review to Writers’ Forum; several anthologies; and three previous collections: Hold Fast, As For Living, and On John Muir’s Trail. He lives with his wife, Linda, on San Juan Island, and likes to think of himself as the novice skipper of a modest boat, an old trawler named Keats.

ISBN: 978-1934999288, 80 pages

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Also by Gary Thompson:

One Thing After Another

Broken By Water: Salish Sea Years