Sundays

Thomas Gardner has the lightest of writerly touches. In his exquisite new poetry collection, Sundays, the effect he achieves in a few lines of focused attention, again and again, is profound, hushed and magical. The delicate integuments of connections his mind makes create works that are nimbly written, but are also substantive, with the heft and weight of serious subjects. Each connection is a surprise, and at the same time, apropos. Sundays shimmers with insight. 

—CYNTHIA HOGUE, AUTHOR OF IN JUNE THE LABYRINTH 

There is a sacrament of friendship both deep and expansive in Thomas Gardner’s Sundays. Here, in actual exchange of substance, poetry and Earth exchange true vows. Gardener has fashioned a cadence of inviolable intimacy that can and must endure. He lives the cadence, winning trust and welcome all the while. 

—DONALD REVELL 

Gardner’s Sundays is a daybook, a gentle Appalachian accounting of weeks. But it’s also more: a testament to long marriage, a ledger of losses, an exercise in attention. Somehow, it is also a brief for trust, that most human risk. Dickinson and Whitman are present in these pages, alongside other tutelary spirits ranging from Wallace Stevens to Eadweard Muybridge to Terrence Malick. Behind them all stands Thomas Traherne, the lonely 17th-century clergyman whose Centuries of Meditations lays the groundwork for Gardner’s gracious paragraphs. “The secret is almost too plain and I stop several times,” Gardner records at one point, “wondering if anyone else has noticed.” This is a book of noticing, and of quiet wonder. 

—G.C. WALDREP