Mortal is a collection of poetry by Thomas Dillon Redshaw, work produced between 2007 and 2016. Elegant and lyrical and ranging in setting from Minnesota to Ireland, many of the poems in Mortal confront the issues of age and the end of life. But they also open our eyes to the overlooked wonders of the natural world. Mortal is a milestone collection by a poet at the top of his form, writing poems of deep sensibility, whimsy, and wonder.
Mortal pays homage to those in life who have been “caught” in mortality’s net. With the luster and simplicity of a fine glaze on a porcelain bowl, these poems capture luminous moments from an ongoing darkness that “we will travel into but not return from.” Mortal’s admirable music, concision, and lyric tenderness all conspire to remind us that the temporal world’s ongoingness is ever both our mocker and all the comfort we can know.
—Leslie Miller, author of Y (2012)
Thomas Dillon Redshaw employs concise and lucid form to great effect, intertwining the rigor of a particular American strain with something close to the lyric order of Irish poetry. Among his poetic gifts are eloquence, insight, and directness. He fetches images from his own local, familiar Midwest scenes with the same intensity of feeling with which he looks at works of art. A notable feature of Mortal is the tender civility and grace of the poems in which he reflects on his father’s old age and infirmities—it is in these poems that his sense of human mortality is most powerfully conveyed.
—Gerard Smyth, author of The Yellow River (2017)
Thomas Dillon Redshaw’s poems are open-eyed and full of pleasure in living even while they listen for the dead. In gardens of thyme, creeping Charlie, rosemary, mint, rue—we learn a kind of herbalist alchemy of acceptance: “Loss is a dear salt / like any other, but its half-life remains unknown.” Mortal gives comfort and companion into that unknown.
—Heid Erdrich, author of Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (2016)
Mortal: Poems 2007–2017 is a richly detailed and elegantly crafted exploration of mutability fine tuned to the times and places where the men and women brought to life here have loved and lived. These luminous, wise, and moving poems—in form and language recalling Dickinson, Hopkins, Kinsella, among others—transport us to the heart of deep time and experience across the Midwest, New England, and Ireland. Mortal is a tremendous achievement.
—Eamonn Wall, author of Junction City (2015)
