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THE WAY SUMMER ENDS

THE WAY SUMMER ENDS

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9968584-3-4

Pub Date: Sept. 2016

Pages: 80


By Thomas Mitchell


Thomas Mitchell’s first collection of poems is a work which celebrates the quotidian, including tools which shape it, but also strike back, bite, cut, bring mystery, repair the barn roof, but allow moonlight on hay in the loft recalling the father who rebuilt it to “do something in the fall.” To paraphrase Hayden Carruth, it’s not necessary to be young—here’s a poet over sixty whose first book is long lived, built by hands “never clean.” Its “radiant sprinkler / runs on in the dark.”

—Ralph Burns


I admire these poems more every time I read them. Subtle, intuitive, kind—these poems live in the implicit, in hints and not-quite-kept secrets. So many of the poems happen in dim light when attention is rewarded, when beauty must be disentangled from shadow—“I know if I look away / everything will disappear”—the poet’s vision, precise but flickery, holds things in being—the signs, the patterns for which the poet is now responsible and only he can report, which Mitchell does in a heightened lyrical clarity.

—Dennis Schmitz

    The Affair

    When the liquor fails at two a.m.,

    he polishes his drink, draws

    some smoke, and leaves the bar

    feeling expensive. If the moon rakes

    through leaves curling by the roadside,

    if the small light dances on the ignition key,

    he doesn’t notice. Three minutes down

    Lark Boulevard, his blue Desoto pulls

    to the curb. An evergreen gives birth

    to a dark tree. His mind drifts

    to a small stone hut where birds fly

    in and out the shuttered windows.


    —Thomas Mitchell


    Thomas Mitchell studied writing at California State University, Sacramento where he received his MA in English, and worked with the poet, Dennis Schmitz. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, studying with Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and William Kittredge. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The New England Review, New Letters, Quarterly West, The New Orleans Review, California Quarterly, and Where We Are: The Montana Poet’s Anthology. He taught middle school in Southern Oregon for many years. He lives there still with his wife, Linda.

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