Published by The Puddin’head Press
Perfect Bound, 56 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches, 2008
ISBN# 978-0-9724339-9-0
$12.00
Tom Roby’s second book, Shape Shifter, displays his versatility as a poet. His poetic styles change, transform, and reflect back on themselves. These poems are tight, descriptive, and insightful. Tom is a Chicago poet who is the president of The Poets’ Club of Chicago. Take a look at the poems in the book linked to on this webpage. I’m sure you will enjoy them immensely. Even enough to want the book for yourself.
Praise for Shape Shifter
Tom Roby, his book, and his title poem are all shape shifters, taking us on journeys that remember life’s stages, show their circumstances, and reveal their characters, in their ironic, humorous, serious, and fantastical realities. Yet his poems never lose his identity, leaving us with that same delight as we imagine with him a plastic bag floating from gull to jellyfish to albino cat. – Wayne Allen Jones, Publisher, Fractal Edge Press
Tom Roby’s work proves that poetry can be esthetic, earthy, abstract, concrete, tender, gritty, avant-garde, nostalgic and even humorous. He not only shifts shapes, he shifts moods, views, styles, and all the reader’s gears. Running a gamut of many multiples, he proves himself a oner who is also a winner. – Glenna Holloway, Founder of The Illinois State Poetry Society, Winner Pushcart Prize
Like the Shape Shifter of its title, Tom Roby’s latest collection of poems is by turns elegant and urbane, lowdown and urban, a graceful passage through a real life from courtship to classroom, from childhood to neighborhood — never flinching, never sentimental — and always, always witty and smart. – Larry Janowski, Author of BrotherKeeper, Associate Professor, Dominican University, Forest Park IL
About Tom Roby
Tom Roby left Virginia by way of Colgate University, earning a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Chicago and a NEH fellowship to study Socrates. He spent the next three decades teaching Humanities in Chicago’s City Colleges, while continuing educational research on curriculum deliberation and organizing international conferences on classroom discussion. He has published and performed his poetry in many venues in Chicago, while leading workshops, writing criticism, and winning various awards. He is President of the Poets’ Club of Chicago, and chairs their annual sonnet contest. He has created The Poetry Wheel in which poets serially relate their poems. Smoke and Mirror Productions selected his poems about The Grin Reaper, Grim’s funnier brother, for performances at The Loop Theater in April 2004. Tom was ChicagoPoetry.com’s Poet of the Month for National Poetry Month, April 2006. A member of the National Association for Poetry Therapy, he makes presentations based on his chapbook, Griever’s Circuit (Fractal Edge Press, 2004) that mourns the death of his wife, Mary. He and his son, multi-instrumentalist, Lem, comprise Omniphonic, a performance poetry duo.
Contents
Adding It All Up
Test Pilot
High Rise Syndrome
Shape Shifter
Muse
Luncheon With The Mermen
In The Museum Garden
Adam
Posting Graveyards
Blood Flowers
Dreamspinner
Dearth
Peacetime Casualty
War Hero
Building Boom, 1946
Practicing
Cowboy
Cain
Judgment Day
Walking The Walk
Educators
Night Janitor
What’s Shakin’?
Daphne And Apollo At The Morton Arboretum
Elohim/Eloher
Stuff Of Dreams
Boatload
To An Elderly Street Person Shoving His Shopping Cart
Against The Light At Michigan And Roosevelt
In A Blizzard Near Midnight
Eviction
What Is Art, Anyway?
A Frayed Rainbow
Courting Success
Under Arles’ Flowering Almonds
To Grant Park’s Orchard Autumn
La Cote D’Azur
Hebrides’ Overture
Bottom Line Glimpsed On A #6 Six Bus
Request To My Reader
On The Perils Of Performing Poetry
What I See In A Compact Mirror Whose Cover Shows Two Cranes
Flying Past Mount Fuji Over A Temple In A Snowstorm
Excerpt
Posting Graveyards
Somewhere, sometime, someone
delivers a letter to a graveyard
and pushes it through a mailbox
slot in the fence where it waits
until the breeze takes it
to graveside to tomb to mausoleum
for the dead to read,
to find what’s in it for them.
No one knows
why anyone writes such a letter,
puts it into an envelope addressed
to whom it may concern, and drops it off
at the graveyard gate at sundown.
No one, that is, except the dead,
who are pleased
someone shows concern for them.
Everyone, except the dead,
must think it useless
to write a letter to anyone
who no longer exists.
Yet some things are so important
that they must be written down
even if they are never read
because if everyone
were to see themselves
as dead—smaller and clearer
as through the opposite
end of a telescope—
then we would all understand
the importance of writing
and hand delivering
our letters to a graveyard gate
and for patience
to await the favor of a reply.
Request To My Reader
Start your search by yourself
but then find me
in some lost anthology
that the library forgot to remainder
or in a chapbook
gifted by an eccentric aunt,
searching without knowing
how to find my special page
so you can put your fingers
to your throat and feel our pulse
as you read me out loud,
and I will give you the right
to slit my page, pull your blade
across the binding, and cut
your thumb, almost by accident,
careful that the blood spurt
won’t blur the words you take,
learn by heart,
read to your closest friends,
so they will want these words,
will want to know about the dyed page
that you can say is our blood
in the flow of life
in mortality.
Visit Shape Shifter on Facebook.
More books by The Puddin’head Press.
See our complete catalog.