In Tremors, Cammy Thomas writes that the ‘eye of the malign stares from the heart of every scene.’ We feel that eye in her accounts of childhood trauma and family dysfunction. We feel its enduring presence too in the adult survivor of that family, a person who knows that ‘unspeakable things’ can and do happen. And we feel it when that adult begins to confront her own ageing, and begins to sense the enforced limits on life and selfhood, especially in those ominous slippages in memory and cognition. Simultaneously, there is a countervailing energy at work in these poems, an energy that resists the array of ‘malign’ forces that batter us and wear us down. The goal of these spare, razor-edged lyrics is to look without flinching at human suffering, and in the process of such scrupulous seeing, affirm the dignity of knowing, for better or worse, who we are and what we face.

What I have always admired about Cammy Thomas’ poetry are the storms that brew within and burst forth from the smallest forms–epigrammatic in size, subtle in surface. This new book takes a dramatic new turn: rhythm foregrounds itself (and rhyme), the lines unspool from their tight cores. There’s no comfort in release, unfortunately–or is it rather our fortune that this is a poet so willing to look her demons in the eye, to name the most difficult, to refuse to shy away, to refuse to sit still and take it. Jean Valentine is an apt comparison, or Medbh McGuckian, or Eleanor Ross Taylor. Cammy Thomas’ work is always willing to take the rockiest path, to swim the deepest waters.