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Traversing the distance between snowy Minnesota and lush Southern California, “Deep Pockets” is a collection of lyric and narrative poems that evoke the passing years and “the soul’s mystery in the material world.” 

The poems span more than 20 years of poet Daniel Thomas’s life and encompass children being born, parents growing old, a son going off to war, and the changing nature of love and long marriage.

Minnesota poet Thomas R. Smith has called “Deep Pockets” “a profound meditation on human relationship.”  These relationships center primarily on family and the ways in which love challenges us to be our best. In the ambitious long poem at the center of the book, Thomas ponders: “Is marriage  / the way we come to know…. our / inability to live in selfless love?”

Tom Simmons, author of “Bring Your Nights with You: New and Selected Poems”writes, “These are among the best commentaries on love I’ve read—and there are a lot of commentaries on love in poetry.”

The approachable poems of “Deep Pockets” will broadly appeal to readers of all backgrounds, but especially those who wish to think deeply about how spiritual awareness infuses the ordinary moments of our daily life. Santa Barbara poet laureate Enid Osborn writes,  “Thomas’s poems carry the wisdom and grace of the Old World, exploring matters of faith and conscience in an age where tenets have lost their purchase.”

Daniel Thomas moved from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Santa Barbara in 2015 to take a position in the Advancement Department at Westmont College. He is currently chief development officer at the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County.  The outstanding poetry community of Santa Barbara has welcomed him to his new home. Paul J. Willis, English professor at Westmont College and author of “Getting to Gardisky Lake” and six other books of poetry, says of Thomas’s poems, “These are poems to keep and to ponder as we seek—each one of us—our own ways forward into this world.”

Thomas is a graduate of the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University (SPU), a program that explores the intersection of art and faith. Gregory Wolfe, founder of the SPU MFA program and of the highly regarded journal Image writes, “Daniel Thomas’s words create shapes that outline the essential form of the things we love: the beauty of nature, the bonds of familial love, the mystery of being alive.”

Deep Pockets was published by Saint Julian Press of Houston in July 2018.

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Richard Jarrette, author of Beso the Donkey and several other books of poetry, wrote this review.  In it, he quotes Dan Gerber, whose most recent book of poetry, Particles: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2017 by Copper Canyon Press.