My new poetry book, River of Light, begins in the gathering headwaters of grief and blessing, then floats through the confluence and flow of Eastern spiritual practices. At its delta, it enters the sea with poems about light and death and speculation on the afterlife.  The poem from which the book takes its title draws inspiration from Canto 30 of Dante’s Paradiso and Monet’s dictum that “the real subject of every painting is light.” 

River of Light was published by Shanti Arts Publishing in 2025 and is available directly from the publisher here. It is also available from Amazon.

Here is a sample poem from the book: Pouring Honey.

Praise for River of Light:

“If anything that becomes visible is light, / then we and all the world are light,” Daniel Thomas writes in a poem that promises “the face / of the Creator is the sum radiance / of everything that shines.” It’s a credo that might well serve for every poem in River of Light, whether it is an elegy or an epiphany, an evensong or an ode to pulling weeds. In an age when darkness threatens to consume us, Thomas’s luminescent poetry insists that hope and an appreciation for the everyday sweetness of life can lead us to an “Abundance…blue as the washed summer sky.”

David Starkey, author of You, Caravaggio and The Moon Shall Not Give Her Light

The poems herein have a quiet presence as if stones shaped by water.  Many of them reveal the artistic and spiritual tradition to which Daniel Thomas belongs—his affinity for Rothko, Vermeer, and Monet, his devotion to Dante, Hildegard of Bingen, and Basho, his love of light and music and the natural world.  Dear Reader, if you are seeking a path and if a book of poems can also be a pilgrimage, then walk along the banks of the River of Light. 

Marsha de la O, author of Creature

An apparent master of natural description, “the world’s wild ornaments,” Daniel Thomas is a poet who “seeks the god of fullness by praising the god of emptiness.” As he observes in River of Light, “language transforms landscape,” and his readers, witnessing this process, will likely be moved to an abundance of praise.

B.H. Fairchild, author of An Ordinary Life