Mark Thalman is the author of Stronger Than the Current, The Peasant Dance, and Catching the Limit. His poetry has appeared in CutBank, Pedestal Magazine, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. Thalman received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon, and he retired after 35 years from teaching English and Creative Writing in the public schools. Thalman is the editor of poetry.us.com. He lives in Forest Grove, Oregon.

Other poems by Mark Thalman in Verse Daily:
September 27, 2009:   "Moving into Night" "I walk down to the dock...."

Books by Mark Thalman:

Other poems on the web by Mark Thalman:
Four poems
Three poems
Three poems
Three poems

Mark Thalman's Website.

About The Peasant Dance:

"Invoking Bruegel's panoramic painting of The Peasant Dance, Thalman explores the full range of sorrow and joy in these poems of memory and family, loss and love. Each poem is a concrete narrative with memorable details, whether about his mother with Alzheimer's 'slowly strangling her mind' or his father, the caregiver: 'Still a husband, he has no wife. / She has been sucked into a vortex, a funeral / that whirls about him each day.' He writes about the body's slow decline, but also tender poems to his second wife: 'I see a ring around the moon, reminding me / of 29 years of marriage / and still being / in love with you.' There is much to recommend in this entire collection."
—Barbara Crooker

"Its title poem occasioned by a Bruegel painting, this collection is characterized by the dark earthiness permeating that Dutch artist's work. In The Peasant Dance, Mark Thalman includes a suite of poems about his Phi Beta Kappa mother subsumed by Alzheimer's and the toll her disease takes on him and his father. But he also gives us—as in his irresistible poem 'Because'—love letters to his cherished wife. Like 'green shoots of wheat/ to be harvested in late summer,' Thalman's poems emerge from the darkness of pain and difficulty to brightly 'finger their way out of red clay.'"
—Paulann Petersen