from im and not this 
Greg Thomas
ISBN: 9781915049070
40pp.
 
part of our Concrete Bundle 🐚 
 
Visual poetry – ‘concrete poetry’ in the language of old money – is as flexible – as funny, as delicate, as powerful! – as the skills of the poet adept enough to take on its energies. Its tradition is older than the sonnet and yet feels newer. It’s as if one of its innate jobs is to respond to the changes in contemporary social space– it is a poetry for outdoor walls as well as for contemplative paper. It can be particularly attuned to the natural world and to changes affecting Earth.
Greg Thomas is a scholar of concrete poetry and he is a delightful practitioner, too. His poems renew the genre. They work across scale – from tiny clever manoeuvres which mutate one word into another with a great sense of fun and surprise, to pieces which command the whole page, making the white-space do metaphoric work as if it were a state of the landscape. There are learned poems, pleasingly daft poems, and pieces sensitive to natural forces. Thomas is especially good at evoking the ‘thisness’ of elements – water, ice, scents – so that a collection of his work is a book refreshingly ‘out in the open’.
- Richard Price 
 
Here is a lush and lucid garden of poems, inviting us to engage in the most pleasurable looking, lingering, and cerebral flexings. The essential relation between word and world is reaffirmed and reinvented in this collection in sometimes suprising, often gleeful, ways. the results are poems which are by turns stately, sweet and elegant. 
- Lila Matsumoto
 
 
Greg Thomas is a writer based in Glasgow. His most recent poem-object publication is Cloud Cover (Essence Press, 2018). His work also appears in The New Concrete (Hayward, 2015), and in the 2021 Poem Atlas exhibition Aww-struck. A found poem co-authored with Saskia McCracken is forthcoming in Dostoyevsky Wannabe Cities: Glasgow. Greg is also an art critic and the author of Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool University Press: 2019).