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-views—displays, 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 poems—sort of like Stevens times Hopkins raised to the power of Hart Crane. When he gets rolling—and virtually any subject matter can be the stimulus—he'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






Copyright (c)
by Thomas Bolt.
All rights reserved.





Out of the Woods reviews


Out of the Woods


"Wedgwood"






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