Barbara L. Thomas is a non-tribal Eastern Cherokee (her mother’s people having escaped the Trail of Tears to settle in Southern Illinois near Shawnee Town). She was born high in the Cascades in 1927; in her teens was the recipient of a generous Lanham Foundation College Scholarship. She came to poetry late, past sixty. Her first book, Lilacs Wilting on Nancy’s Bonnet: A Cherokee Narrative, was nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and the Bumbershoot Literary Award, 2001.
Barbara moved to Kalispell in 2003 after the death of her husband of fifty-one years. In the Flathead she enjoys the closeness of a daughter’s family, a terrain reminiscent of the high Cascades where her father was a ranger; neighbours and friends; snowshoeing, kayaking; gardening; in the winter of 2008–9 swam eight miles in sex months at a Kalispell pool, the eighty miles equivalent to the distance around Montana’s Flathead Lake
To read Barbara Thomas’s poetry is to find oneself roaming a landscape of elegant and poignant images full of children, nature, loss, celebration and acute observation. She “dives into daily life,” discovering long buried memories and surprising, unpredictable moments. She makes the fleeting moment precious. A true poet, Ms Thomas allows us glimpses into her life as intimate and intricate as a Vermeer painting. Nothing escapes her eye as she captures a delightful “parade of small things,” weaving ancestral yarns throughout her book. She has the “spirit of a hummingbird” flittering from moment to moment. Each page of poetry is filled with luscious vocabulary, delicious, unusually personal and yet, universal life events. Her poetic images and storytelling are like a gift from a dear friend, “too beautiful to turn away.”
—Lauren Kaushansky, Poet, Playwright, Educator
Kayak Women, an elder, embraces love with the ascendant innocence of her experience. “So much sorrow-/ husband, lover, hopes,...” Nothing keeps her kayak from beginning the journey. Neither does it save her from more sorrows, and more losses. “Dawn, a wise woman, named the critter/ mountain lion./ Look to the pines, she said/ before you leave your porch...” It is this that I love in Barbara Thomas’ journey. These words from Beach Stones: “Who among my people/ would relinquish the medicine/ of dreamers?” One is anointed, gilded in Thomas’ poetry, through her fearlessness: “The doe nuzzles/ her fawn under barbwire...” In this way, Thomas shows us how to make something out of loss.”
—Jim Bodeen, Publisher
Line by line, in the poems of Barbara Thomas, keen observations click together like puzzle pieces. Her quiet, mature, confident tones invite the reader to discover extraordinary possibilities in ordinary things. For instance, in the opening lines of “Entwined”, two mule deer feed at dusk in a stubble field. Four lines later move the reader’s eye to the “midfield reserve,” a small plots of ground left purposefully fallow. For what reason? Is it just wise agriculture, or is it something more? The ploughman, coffee in hand, muses on the “spirit shapes/ still visible in the gloom” where humankind is only a temporary presence in an ancient landscape of “antelope,/ Chinese pheasants,/ somewhere a badger/ or vole.” These seemingly simple poems offer subtle—often startling—revelations.
—Lowell Jaeger, Poet
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