Poetry Collections:

Birdwatching in Wartime
Renovation
Country of Lost Sons

Anthologies:

From the Fishouse

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Renovation

Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2005

Jeffrey Thomson's third full-length poetry collection, Renovation, is an elegiac look at the poet's personal histroy in the context of a larger culture of myth, literature, and violence. Passing through the landscapes of Europe and America, Renovation attempts to reconstruct loss out of the fragments of history. Poems from this collection won fellowships to the Writers @ Work Conference and the Academy of American Poets Prize.

Praise for Renovation

Throughout the course of his earlier work, Jeffrey Thomson has been laboring to compose a poem whose thought is apprehensible to the senses, and whose passions are, in his term, renovated in the troubling mind. This book is the fruit of that labor: at once wordly and intimate and attuned to particulars....A collection to return to again and again
- Sherod Santos

Jeffrey Thomsonis an astute traveler, a keen observer -- the perfect guide. He explores the distances between people, between worlds, and how those distances can be overcome to provide brief glimpses of harmony, yet how quickly the differences return. These gentle, often elegiac poems, reveal Thomson as a writer full of tenderness and nuance. I keep refering to this book as Revelation, not Renovation, and that says it all.
-Jim Daniels