Description
In the backhoe’s shadow, one takes a brief rest in the midst of responsibilities and needs, considering what comes next. In his debut poetry collection, In the Backhoe’s Shadow, Thomas Alan Holmes offers a measured evaluation of a lost past, balancing the consequences of generational shift with expanded understanding of family, love, and place. At turns pastoral, lyrical, contemplative, descriptive, and, sometimes, playful, the collection explores how to sustain after years of separation the virtues of the stream, the pasture, and the hive.
Praise for In the Backhoe’s Shadow
The poems in this fine collection are by turns plainspoken, meticulous, bereft, and at times, outrageously funny. Such a combination is rich and inviting. We have a record of life and lives lived in the rural south as the larger waves of American history sweep it back and forth. That movement feels inevitable, but it’s accompanied by the lull of verse strumming and plucking these lines along. The art is obvious and resonant, working as a sifter to soften and disperse a world that was in order to join the world that is. This is a book of honesty and affection and hard-won intelligence. One reads it and is transported and more firmly planted at once—exactly what we seek from poetry.
—Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter
If poets had monikers like bluesmen, Thomas Alan Holmes’s handle would be “Appalachian Smooth.” He resolutely recognizes a telling moment and walks it out the line and stands it at the crossroads—where place, time, language, and music intersect. In the Backhoe’s Shadow is a work of mature resonance from a practiced artist who has taken his time and humbly, yet expertly, accepted a calling.
—Darnell Arnoult, author of Galaxie Wagon and What Travels with Us
In the Backhoe’s Shadow celebrates the bonds of family in a time of rapid change. The poems display extraordinarily precise, photographic details of work and memory, childhood games and pets, sad country songs. Some are poems of dailiness and humor, and the legacy of a certain time and place. Holmes is a gifted storyteller of the struggle with contemporary uncertainties, of deep kinship, of love.
—Robert Morgan, author of Dark Energy
