“Thomas Aslin has brought us a fine, sometimes heartbroken but more often celebratory sight of his days and the days of his people. And ours. Believe you me, his grandfather used to say. That’s what I want to say. Believe you me. A Moon Over Wings lights up the night. Just a splendid book.”
—William Kittredge
“I can’t think when I’ve read a collection that so persistently embodies Faulkner’s dictum that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Thomas Aslin’s A Moon Over Wings is saturated with elegy—these often seem the meditations of a solitary survivor. But the poems are driven by a more dynamic need as well: to reassess old motives, old understandings, old grievances, to keep the conversation from ending—most especially the one between a son and his difficult father. A Moon Over Wings is loaded with real-world detail and imagery of startling power—for example, the father’s body, seen for the final time, “still as river rock under clear water.” But what I most admire is how Aslin, like his teacher and friend, Northwest poet Richard Hugo, can transmute these facts of personal history into a more mysterious music, which rises, often, to the level of incantation.”
—David Long, author of The Inhabited World
“Like the Eastern poets of Li Po and Tu Fu, or the Western poets of Richard Hugo and James Welch, in Tom Aslin’s work the natural world reflects inner lives. Crows on wires; tulip beds and windborne snow; apple trees and elk; whiskey, and strawberries. The beauty and bright pain of life are on full display in this collection, as is the knowledge that death awaits, and that the “tenuous light” in-between is the here, and the now, full of “stories of blue snow and feral wings.” “I lift the lid from a small, wood box,” the narrator says, in “Parents in a Box in a Drawer.” And like the narrator in that poem, Aslin in this collection lifts the lid of what it means to live in the inland Pacific Northwest, admitting “how difficult it is.” These essential poems are rooted in the earth, in work, and ultimately in the poetic canon.”
—Jordan Hartt
“A Moon Over Wings is an attentive, loving book. It is nourishing and beautiful portraiture.”
—Sandra McPherson, author of Expectation Days
“A Moon Over Wings is a haunted, haunting examination of love as a blessing, love as a curse, the echoes of what’s been lost or left behind ringing with beautiful clarity. Aslin’s poems breathe on the page—intimate songs of memory and mercy and love.”
—Samuel Ligon
