Comment on this article

poems in water
by Mary Langer Thompson
Cover art by June Langer
57 pages/40 poems
ISBN: 978-0-9915983-2-8
Publisher: Green Fuse Poetic Arts
1000 W. Eisenhower #11
Loveland, Colorado 80537
www.greenfusepoeticarts.org
Price: $12.00
Order through Amazon.com


About the Book


Poems about memory, loss and every day humor and wonder.


Review of the Book:


Mary Langer Thompson is a clever poet. Not overly clever. Just the right amount in every poem.
She's clearly crafting her poems to maximize the visceral quality of her storytelling through
line by line revelations of image and statement. Mary has mined her life experience to produce
diamond-like artifacts of raw emotional feeling leavened with dry witty comebacks. The result?
A quite fun and intelligent book of poetry that instills in the reader a desire to pick up a modern-
day quill and parchment to start their very own dialogue with life.
‐Don Kingfisher Campbell, MFA, editor of the San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly


When I read Mary Langer Thompson's first collection, poems in water, I recognized the unique
voice of a friend and teacher. Thompson is a keen observer of the world and its people. In
"Koko's offerings," a homeless women places gifts of fruit and tightly rolled money on the
altar of a cathedral. The reader understands Koko's obsessive nature as well as her total
devotion. In the second stanza, Thompson catalogs gifts left at a makeshift sidewalk altar
devoted to Koko's memory. There on the street where she slept, her friends left " …a purple
agapanthus in/ a MacDonald's cup,/ a candle in chipped glass and/ cards with ink that will
fade, ….' Thompson allows the reader to weigh these sets of gifts‐what Koko offered as a gift
of love and what she received. There is no sentimental moral drawn, but a sensitive person has
to recognize Koko had the generosity we associate with the great saints of history. As in the
title piece, 'poem in water,' I found this poem and the others included in the collection were
indeed a baptism of pure words, "…washing the dust from my heart."
‐Dawn McDuffie


About the Author:


Mary Langer Thompson has published poetry, short stories, and articles in a variety of
anthologies and journals, including Quill and Parchment, Silk Road Review, and Off the
Coast.     She is a contributor to The Working Poet (Autumn Press), a poetry writing text,
and Women on Poetry:  Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching  (McFarland & Com-
pany, Inc.)    A former elementary school principal and secondary English teacher, Mary
is an active member of the California Writers Club, High Desert Branch.    She was the 2012
Senior Poet Laureate of California.


From the Book:


Poem in Water
by Mary Langer Thompson

By Lingering Lake
I watch a Chinese poet
with sweeping brush strokes
write characters
in water
upon the pavement.

Disciples follow in silence
under the willow trees
reading retextured liquid,
the path an impermanent context.

I can't decipher the message
of this groundling poem,
but feel unmoored
then embraced, bent and baptized,
evaporating verse
washing the dust from my heart.


 

Return to: