Review of MY HEART IS NOT ASLEEP

My Heart Is Not Asleep, Thomas A. Thomas, MoonPath Press 2024.

William Wordsworth famously described poetry as “strong emotion…recollected in tranquility,” and that is how I want to think about—or think with and through—this collection of poems by Thomas A. Thomas, a photographer and an extraordinary poet, now the Assistant Managing Editor at MoonPath Press.

Because My Heart leads us down the path of a partner’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease, through the painful decline, to loss, I both wanted to read this book, and I very much didn’t want to read it. Before my own husband was moved into a residential care home, I picked the book up multiple times, but couldn’t make myself continue. Around the first of this year, however, I told myself it was time, and I took it with me to a local café. Once I began, I read it all the way through. Five sections, 29 poems: I thought I could easily gin out a review. Tried. Couldn’t. A few weeks ago, having read it through again, I found my way in. Narrative arc of disease and death aside, My Heart Is Not Asleep is primarily a love story. So that’s the book I’m here to tell you about.

“Around Us,” the second poem in the collection, lights up the two main characters like gods in an ancient Greek drama. They may be on their way to a hard fall, but, reading this poem, I knew I wanted to be there to see it:

A beam of full moonlight falls through the skylight and
graces our pillows, our faces, lights up
dust motes, like stars turning silently above our bed.

Silver lights reflect “high knotty pine ceiling / and the knotty pine walls, each knot / you said, a galaxy.” The poem holds the arc of the whole book, ending with “eons exploded and long gone dark stars.”

As Alzheimer’s begins turning out the lights, the story grows darker, but the epic setting is still present. “In a Time,” about one-third of the way through, depicts a moment of seeming stasis, “times when I feel trapped in time,” August, Covid-time, memories of weddings, memories of “my beloved’s first illness, / harbinger of worse to come.” Yet it ends with this crescendo, not to be missed:

And it is still the month berries ripen along
humid vines, corn ears swell in steamy fields,
as fawns fatten out of their spots, gorging on
clover blossoms and dandelion blooms, as seal
pups bask between fishing lessons, as fingerlings

flash to avoid shadows, as kingfisher young
learn not to make shadows as they dive, it is
the month apples begin to blush at the thought
of falling, time of joy upon joy, joy upon sorrow,
time of sorrow, time of love upon love upon love.

The setting is another facet that makes these poems sparkle. Seal pups, fawns, apples that blush “at the thought / of falling.” Even eating chocolate or a strawberry, we know where we are, and it’s not city or suburb. When we encounter the first poem with those dread words, “care home,” Thomas even then peppers his love with exact and moving detail, as if to bring her home: “brine tears,” an owl calling “good night night,” “nights like burnt wicks,” the familiar exhaustion of stacking wood, “huckleberry like a ruby.”

The last poem, perhaps the shortest, sounds exactly the right note, casting the “little boat of her hospital bed,” into a much larger sea, that of the heart. We’re at the end of a journey and if there can be only one survivor, how lucky we are to have someone who bears such eloquent witness.

My Heart Is Not Asleep was a finalist for the 2025 Washington State Book Award in poetry. You can purchase a copy at MoonPath Press, from your local independent book store, or you can order directly from Thomas’s website: https://thomas-a-thomas.com/.