This Time tomorrow
Published by The Waywiser Press, 2013.
In This Time Tomorrow, Matthew Thorburn searches for his own particular answers to some fundamental questions: Why do we travel? Why seek out new places and cultures, only to have to leave them? Whether writing about Japan, China or Iceland, Thorburn brings his sharp eye and musical ear to the poet's work: honoring with words the mysteries and wonders—life's essential strangeness—to be found in whatever landscape we choose to wander.
Visit the Waywiser This Time Tomorrow page.
"A Field of Dry Grass," a poem from This Time Tomorrow, first appeared in Ploughshares. Read the story behind the poem on the Ploughshares blog.
Read a Few Poems...
"How We Found Our Way" on the Academy of American Poets' website
"Little Thieves" in Memorious and Poetry Daily
"The Trick with the Stick" in Linebreak
"To the Net Master" in Memoir (and)
In This Time Tomorrow, Matthew Thorburn searches for his own particular answers to some fundamental questions: Why do we travel? Why seek out new places and cultures, only to have to leave them? Whether writing about Japan, China or Iceland, Thorburn brings his sharp eye and musical ear to the poet's work: honoring with words the mysteries and wonders—life's essential strangeness—to be found in whatever landscape we choose to wander.
Visit the Waywiser This Time Tomorrow page.
"A Field of Dry Grass," a poem from This Time Tomorrow, first appeared in Ploughshares. Read the story behind the poem on the Ploughshares blog.
Read a Few Poems...
"How We Found Our Way" on the Academy of American Poets' website
"Little Thieves" in Memorious and Poetry Daily
"The Trick with the Stick" in Linebreak
"To the Net Master" in Memoir (and)
This Time Tomorrow is available directly from Waywiser Press, as well as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell's Books, and select local booksellers in the U.S. and U.K.
Autographed copies available directly from the author via the link at right.
$
18.00
What people are saying about this time tomorrow
“Mathew Thorburn’s This
Time Tomorrow takes the reader on a journey of self-discovery—a physical journey over Icelandic water turned to barbaric glass by volcanic eruptions and, at the same time, a saga of Japan merging with memory of Asian things past—all cast in his particular calligraphic script. He cites Bashō’s unhappiness at being “in Kyoto” while, at the same time, “longing for Kyoto.”
Thorburn seems to lament that wherever he is physically, mentally he is elsewhere. Perhaps this is the indirectly stated point of his saga: Wherever we are we are not. Why not?”
—Stanley Barkan
“The evocative imagery of Matthew Thorburn’s poems chronicles both what we think we’re looking for and how we look—a bittersweet journey, replete with shifting boundaries of travel, which underscores our inability to stay, or be, in any one place for more than its moment, thus engaging what it means to be here at all. But if mistaking a billboard of Mt. Fuji for Mt. Fuji itself names the inauthentic in the search for the authentic, Thorburn’s poems also tell us wonderfully that a plastic leaf falling can allow us to hear birds singing. Because, finally, what his journey reveals is the desire that lies both with and as the source of artifice, the
true feeling only encountered by taking our chances with the fleeting landscape of the heart.”
—Maxine Scates
“This Time Tomorrow contains some of the best travel poems being written today. In vivid and surprising accounts of his travels, Thorburn’s eye for particulars never lets him down. He is a master of simultaneous action and perception. A dog-sled driver in Iceland rates equal billing with what the poet sees on the dog-sled ride, and the realities of present-day tourism become part of the
story: “we sipped / instant coffee while he waited / for our Visa to go through.” Gloria, disappointed in love in Kyoto, is as important as the famous temples and hermitages there. Matthew Thorburn is smart, alert and always good company on the road.”
—Richard Tillinghast
“Matthew Thorburn’s This Time Tomorrow is a series of travelogues that are simultaneously internal and external. Though the poems are set in Iceland, Japan and China, and rich with fresh imagery of those places, his real subject is ‘the built-in sadness of travel,’ with ‘sadness’ conjuring the innate interiority of being in foreign lands. Like Bashō he chronicles the way that passing through the physical world with genuine curiosity and openness can cause sudden rifts to open, yielding profound glimpses into human consciousness. In a voice that is inventive, natural, honest and always clear, Matthew Thorburn has given us an exciting extended meditation on what it means to study the ever-surprising geography of one’s own mind.”
—Chase Twichell
Thorburn seems to lament that wherever he is physically, mentally he is elsewhere. Perhaps this is the indirectly stated point of his saga: Wherever we are we are not. Why not?”
—Stanley Barkan
“The evocative imagery of Matthew Thorburn’s poems chronicles both what we think we’re looking for and how we look—a bittersweet journey, replete with shifting boundaries of travel, which underscores our inability to stay, or be, in any one place for more than its moment, thus engaging what it means to be here at all. But if mistaking a billboard of Mt. Fuji for Mt. Fuji itself names the inauthentic in the search for the authentic, Thorburn’s poems also tell us wonderfully that a plastic leaf falling can allow us to hear birds singing. Because, finally, what his journey reveals is the desire that lies both with and as the source of artifice, the
true feeling only encountered by taking our chances with the fleeting landscape of the heart.”
—Maxine Scates
“This Time Tomorrow contains some of the best travel poems being written today. In vivid and surprising accounts of his travels, Thorburn’s eye for particulars never lets him down. He is a master of simultaneous action and perception. A dog-sled driver in Iceland rates equal billing with what the poet sees on the dog-sled ride, and the realities of present-day tourism become part of the
story: “we sipped / instant coffee while he waited / for our Visa to go through.” Gloria, disappointed in love in Kyoto, is as important as the famous temples and hermitages there. Matthew Thorburn is smart, alert and always good company on the road.”
—Richard Tillinghast
“Matthew Thorburn’s This Time Tomorrow is a series of travelogues that are simultaneously internal and external. Though the poems are set in Iceland, Japan and China, and rich with fresh imagery of those places, his real subject is ‘the built-in sadness of travel,’ with ‘sadness’ conjuring the innate interiority of being in foreign lands. Like Bashō he chronicles the way that passing through the physical world with genuine curiosity and openness can cause sudden rifts to open, yielding profound glimpses into human consciousness. In a voice that is inventive, natural, honest and always clear, Matthew Thorburn has given us an exciting extended meditation on what it means to study the ever-surprising geography of one’s own mind.”
—Chase Twichell
"Disappears in the rain"
This Time Tomorrow is built around "Disappears in the Rain," a long renga-like poem that unrolls across the pages like a scroll painting filled with fleeting yet resonant images from a trip through Japan.
Parlor City Press published the poem as a chapbook in 2009. An except from the poem was also produced as a letterpress broadside by the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan in 2006.
Parlor City Press published the poem as a chapbook in 2009. An except from the poem was also produced as a letterpress broadside by the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan in 2006.
