Terra Firma

In Terra Firma, Selected by Denise Levertov for the National Poetry Series and winner of the 1991 American Book Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award, Thomas Centolella establishes a mature vision, with narratives and meditations that seek a communal condition. In poems spoken intimately, as though to a friend, Centolella balances between the stoical and the sentimental, visiting a "permanent" earth which remains forever temporal in human experience, searching for the sacramental, redemptive experience that binds apparent opposites.