Michael’s poetry collection, A Time for Such a Word, is published by Black Pear Press, Spring 2024.

Details of the collection, including how to order it from Black Pear Press, appear here.

‘A time for such a word’ is taken from Macbeth, which might suggest an attempt to doom this collection from the start.  True, there are dark corners here and there, but they exist for good reasons and are most carefully explored.  And there is also much light and hopefulness.  Visiting different points of time and space—now a desert island at dusk, now a log-store with an out-of-season moth, now Grenada, now a suburban house as it unbuilds itself—Thomas’s speakers reflect, speculate, even reanimate what seems valueless, a lost cause, a scene of no account.   The collection’s final line is ‘You’re alright, you, you’re alright.’  Now quietly, now emphatically, A Time for Such a Word insists that the world might just be so.