Country of Lost Sons, The: Poems

By Jeffrey Thomson

Jeffrey Thomson’s second collection of poems, The Country of Lost Sons, investigates the narrative environment of childhood, especially the way violence is inscribed on children through myth, culture, and legend. The poems trace the growth of the author’s young son (his vulnerability and equal potential for violence) across a landscape of rewritten myth and narrative. From the Trojan War (bracketed as it is by the deaths of two children, Iphegenia and Astyanax) through the Biblical accounts of Job, Jeremiah, and Jephthah to the modern tragedies of the war in Kosovo, AIDS, and the contemporary culture of violence, the poems build to a culmination of fear that is only tempered by love, grace, and the redemptive power of storytelling itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Feb 8, 2004
• ISBN: 9781602358621

Jeffrey Thomson

Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and is the author of multiple books including the memoir fragile, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and the edited collection From the Fishouse.  Alice James Books published Half/Life: New & Selected Poems in October 2019.  He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University.  He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.

Book preview

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following magazines in which these poems first appeared, or are forthcoming, some in slightly different form:

Crab Creek Review, Paris

Flint Hills Review, Tables

Ginko Tree Review, Desire (as My Own Desire)

Natural Bridge, The Lastica, Kosovo section of Goodnight Nobody (as Lastica, Kosovo) and The Country of Lost Sons

New Delta Review, Goodnight Nobody (sequence)

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Terrible Gestures

Puerto del Sol, Elegy for the Living in Early Spring and Plato’s Expulsion

Southeast Review, Narrative and "Bu Topraklar Bizimdi: A Message from Lefkosa"

Willow Springs, The Coffeehouse War (as Postscript)

Temptation won the Master’s Poetry Contest, 2002.

I am indebted to a number of people without whose help and support this book would never have occurred. Gratitude is due to Sherod Santos, Lynne McMahon, Tony Deaton, Penelope Pelizzon, Andrew Hudgins, Terri Witek, Anna Catone, Alan Shapiro, Robert Hass, Mary Jo Salter, and Terrance Hayes for their time, their friendship, and their invaluable assistance and expert critique. But, as always, the most well-deserved thanks is reserved for Jennifer Anne.

—Jeffrey Thomson

Narrative

—for Andrew Hudgins

Because it all begins with story,

the telling around the fire tearing

itself free from wood’s fingerprint,

the book open on the table beside

a pitcher quivered with Calla lilies

or a fragrant spray of Carolina jasmine

whose honey is said to poison bees,

perhaps I should begin with the U-boat cook

opening his ration box of socks

late in the war. These socks, charcoal,

delicate as shadows in his hands,

made from human hair. He slips

them over his rotten feet and flits

through the ringing narrows, the tunnel

of air he travels with and through.

Or because all narrative is about

the self, personal and florid,

maybe I should begin with the