Gail Thomas
award-winning poet, teacher, and speaker; has published four books of poetry; Waving Back (Turning Point, 2015) was named a Must Read for 2016 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and Odd Mercy (Headmistress, 2016) was chosen by Ellen Bass for the Charlotte Mew Prize; her poems have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx, Hanging Loose, North American Review, Chiron Review, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and New Verse News
The Little Mommy Sonnets
"I will put Chaos into fourteen lines and keep him there..." — Edna St. Vincent Millay
1
Your voice, always in my head until the shrinking,
until I could call you Little Mommy. When you lost
the family names, we watched them march out
the door holding hands with the hurts that kept us
licking our wounds. Now this mess of plaques
and tangles, a nest of lesser evils: to forget
the word for daughter or lose decades of strife.
Some people study for years at the feet of a master
to learn how to live in the moment. Your sharp
tongue dissolves to a soft fog, my armor melts,
the clear moment before us like a plowed field.
You fall asleep to the sound of my voice
humming something that makes you smile
before this long goodbye.
from Odd Mercy by Gail Thomas (Headmistress Press)
Winner of the 2016 Charlotte Mew Prize
The centerpiece of Odd Mercy is "The Little Mommy Sonnets," a crown of sonnets that carries us poignantly through the life and death of the poet's mother, as well as their complicated bond over time. I was impressed with Gail Thomas' dedication to craft, her richness of detail and especially her deft transitions from the end line of one sonnet to the opening line of the next. The challenge here is to repeat the line, but to make it new, to show us another facet, and Thomas does that so skillfully in these poems, propelling us forward through the narrative. Poetry uses words to convey what is beyond words, to say the unsayable. The last line of Odd Mercy expresses this paradox tenderly as the poet reflects on her mother: "your words/now gibberish, your voice always in my head." — Ellen Bass, Judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize