Dragging the Lake

"Photographers once risked their hands and eyes, igniting vials of magnesium powder, so powerful is the love of the image," says the title poem of this collection, whose images range from the northern lights to St. Bridget turning bathwater into beer. "Did you know some people claim to have heard the aurora? one poem asks. The muses of music and image wrestle in these poems, but from the songs of Elvis Costello to the operas of Leos Janacek, music seems to prevail, even against "the glorious, trillion-spined black lava slicing through your flip-flops," and "night jasmine kicking the door ajar."

Robert Thomas' first book, Door to Door (Fordham University Press, 2002) was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa as the winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize, and in 2003 he received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, Field, The Iowa Review, New England Review, The Southern Review, Slate, The Threepenny Review, and many other magazines. He and his wife live in South San Francisco.