Reviews
of the Poetry
"...Bolt excavates hope in lost places."
Village
Voice
"...a versatile poet, at home both
in an American scene strewn with minimalist wreckage and in a marbled-paper
dreamland where cultural antitheses are swirled together...."
American
Academy of Arts and Letters,
Rome
Prize for Literature Citation
"One of the things I admire most about
the work of Thomas Bolt is his familiarity with and fertile use of science
and natural history in his poems. And he doesn't simply deploy their vocabularies
but embodies their distinctive world-viewsdisplays, like a great
museum, only a small part of what he possesses. In fact, he seems almost
insatiable for technical lore of all kinds, from gothic architecture to
Antarctic hydrology to the fabrication of Wedgwood. But the principal
thing, to which all else is subsidiary, is the sheer verbal ecstasy of
his poemssort of like Stevens times Hopkins raised to the power of
Hart Crane. When he gets rollingand virtually any subject matter
can be the stimulushe's like Alvin Lee or Jimi Hendrix on a riff
that leaves paraphrase and analysis far behind."
Jeffrey
Gustavson,
Alliance
Stage Poets' Reading Series
"...Bolt loves cars, their speed and
danger. He prizes the land, the leaves, the dirt, everything endangered
and scourged. And in that tension his poems quake mournfully, with an
energy that belies their elegiac note-the earth is 'fouled, fallen, fortified,'
and 'even the snow falls brown / From smoked skies, each flake / Seizing
its strange nucleus of grit.'"
Village
Voice
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by Thomas Bolt.
All rights reserved.
Out of the Woods reviews
Out of the Woods
"Wedgwood"
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