paper • 52 pages • 14.95
ISBN-10: 1-884800-63-7

Cathedral of Wish

Cammy Thomas

Winner of The Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award 2006

Selected by Medbh McGuckian

In Cammy Thomas’s poems we are immediately thrust into the ice-crack of family legacy, guided by Thomas’s chilling unsurprise in the face of violence or violent austerity. The simplicity of her language suggests that this austerity is fundamental, irrevocable, and yet something in Thomas’s fierceness also suggests it can be faced down.

Praise by Chase Twichell
Praise by Jennifer Clarvoe
Praise by Gail Mazur
Praise by Medbh McGuckian, judge

“Cammy Thomas’s tough little lyrics revisit a childhood as if through a prism: they contain the whole, but refract it into distinct panes so we can see up close what would be too terrible intact. Their utter spareness and refusal to sentimentalize the hard facts make them both spooky and powerful. What’s most moving to me is the way the child survives as a ghost inside the adult. It’s as if the child has finally allowed the adult to say what was, until now, unsayable.” — Chase Twichell

“These fiercely clear-eyed, dry-eyed poems see what is given to them to see with the strange, steady lucidity of a fever dream. It is a charged inheritance, both dark and tender, lush and harsh. Here, ‘stern old god the father/ ashed his cigar/ in a silver porringer,’ while the mother (in ‘Snake’) ‘scoops up something/ nothing to it she says/ as it writhes in the air/ and we back away admiring.’ What are we offered that might not burn or bite? Books, bottles, shotguns, violins, all the family instruments of sweetness and destruction as orchestrated in Thomas’s heart-breaking poems, these are manifestly musical instruments, with a music both haunting and halting, aware of the harm in charm. And yet there is a gusto, too, in the sound, for example, of ‘rococo radiators whanged with sticks,’ that promises not to be beaten, to give back as good as it gets.” — Jennifer Clarvoe

“What a fierce beauty, something ‘coiling and jeweled/ twisting in the dark,’ Cammy Thomas has brought into the light in Cathedral of Wish. Out of the blazing havoc, the searing extravagance of the family crucible, after the consuming flames, what remains in these poems is only the hardest substance, only the stuff that’s true.” — Gail Mazur

Cathedral of Wish by Cammy Thomas is a difficult, possibly belated, certainly hardearned, collection. A first book is nearly always autobiographical and personal, and this one is so burningly. These ‘gasps,’ for such they are, at the extremes of family brutality and shame, where only the italicized parental speeches are punctuated, reveal a painful story that is all too familiar, without self-pity, charting a male power and abuse so starkly as to be almost a political diagnosis. Infidelity is the crux of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the central experience sublimated by Yeats: here the ambivalence is ‘anguish dimmed but with it, rapture.’ Other fine and noteworthy nearwinners had more verbal ingenuity, more varied thematic density, yet none had quite this sustained and tragic unrelievedness, where what is not said is even more haunting than what is. . . .” — Medbh McGuckian, judge