Wolf Tree and Agave

There is so much yet to know, to expose and explore, to open up what we never considered, that demands our presence, to open up what we never expected and never dreamed of, to step into old and new worlds. It is a riveting adventure to follow the lines of poetry written and shared between Larry Thomas and Clarence Wolfshohl, and now with the reader. From the Great Chihuahuan Desert to the backwoods brambles of Mid-Missouri and the Central Plains, they stand a 1000 miles apart under blue skies so vast, they stand together, sharing the pages of each other's lives, hearing how they reflect, recall, reinvigorate each other's lives. And to the reader, Wolfshohl writes, "May your mad prophet hear the sweet soughing of my oaks."

Walter Bargen, First Poet Laureate of Missouri and author of Orwell at the Kremlin

We're in luck that close friends Larry and Clarence have received and replied to, in intuitive ways, one another's poems. The two poets, as they write, rhythm their ways into memories—childhood, family, trees and flowers, rodeo flings, fields and forests, the evocative Texas and Missouri ecosystems of their lives lived in the mysterious meanwhile of Time as we all approach our ends. When I read two of the many portraits here, too, read them and the rest of Wolf Tree and Agave several times, Larry's "The Vaquero" and Clarence's "Tattoo Palimpsest," I realised, again, the depths of what true poetry could be, and so will you.

William Heyen, National Book Award Finalist, author of Nature: Selected & New Poems 1970-2020 and Diaspora: Fifteen Collections

Prepare yourself. As you dive into this collaboration between two fine poets, you may find yourself deeply moved. Their exchange of poems becomes a symphony of call and response, each poem a prompt of sorts to the next. Each poet's biome and heart reaches to the other—sotol to hickory, high desert to glacial moraine. Each poet's home compared and described with precision. Mountain lions or groundhogs, ocotillo or morels, their fathers and their sorrows. Wolfshohl has his "woods so dense... you cannot see." Thomas, facing the Chihuahuan desert "probes its depths/as one would a tome of philosophy." This book will embrace you in its narrative arc, describing that rare unicorn—the deep friendship of two men.

Lucy Griffith, Ph.D. award winning poet and essayist