User's Guide to a Blank Wall (Mode d'emploi pour un mur vide)

by Thomas Scott

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1897018177
• ISBN13: 9781897018170
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: Editions du GREF
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Thomas Scott a National Treasure

Scott's writing establishes an instant link with the reader. You just know he would be a good guy to spend time with. He's a hard-boiled realist and a relentless romantic, finding amusement and hope in everyday situations and predicaments. Clearly, he's been around the block - at the same time, he displays a willingness to engage in familiar activities as though they were new. In fact, he succeeds in making them new even to media-saturated, channel-hopping readers who think they don't like poetry. This is romance for the not-faint-at-heart. It's not over the top, but it's certainly not dreamy or whimsical. It's real, it's urgent and muscular. Thomas Scott show you that you've just got to believe in the possibility of love and happiness, even if most of time you settle for being warm and well-fed. In the realm of poetry, this is the Canada the world deserves to see and read. One hopes he writes more - lots more - soon.

Heart, sensuality, and unflinching honesty

At first blush, Scott's work is as welcoming as morning coffee with a neighbor, and as deceptively simple. Yet just as that morning coffee can be a vehicle for finely nuanced communication, so does the poetry serve as an opportunity to enter into a rich relationship with the multilayered creations, and with the poet himself. Whether delving into carnality in "Skin," poignant longing in "Imperfect Cadence," or self-deprecating humor in "E-Mail to My A-List," Scott writes with a keen talent for internal and external observation, and an immediacy that propels the reader into his worldview. He writes with heart, with sensuality, and with unflinching honesty. I enjoyed this book tremendously and look forward to future work by the author.

Outstanding!

I love this book. I received it from a friend who thought I would appreciate this new poet's work, and I most certainly did. For a first book of poems, Thomas Scott's work is very accessible and surprisingly polished. This poet has a way of taking a seemingly mundane act and lifting it with words into full and vivid relief - breathing life into those moments that usually pass unnoticed. His words are sensual, funny, sharp and concise, and I revisited some of the pieces over and over again - each time finding some new truth hidden within. Mostly, I found myself wondering if the poems were written by someone who knew me intimately. My favorite poem in this collection (which I've copied below) hit solidly home. I will definitely be on the watch for Thomas Scott's next book. Lost and Found She disappeared in front of her own eyes in little pieces dumped into a big truck victim of strange men with soiled gloves who never smile she got herself back in installments like a magazine delivered every week by a lovely whistling man in a clean blue suit who knows her name