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

In my half century of experience as a poet and poetry editor, I have never encountered writers more attuned to and skilled at the poetry of place than Larry D. Thomas and Clarence Wolfshohl. In Wolf Tree and Agave, readers are gifted the unusual opportunity to enjoy a poetic correspondence between these two men, through which they not only give us vivid and varied portraits of Texas and Missouri landscapes, flora and fauna, but in some real sense help us comprehend how place influences and even defines memory, personal history and belief. When Thomas concludes his poem about the coming of spring in West Texas with “blood red” buds, “against the azure/ flesh of the sky/ smarting/ like fresh/ deep cuts (“We Know We’re Well”) and Wolfshohl responds in “Another Sign of Spring,” with a final image of new leaves unfolding, “like the garments/ of morning dressers who feel/ the freshness against their limbs,” we see one of many instances in this startlingly genuine volume, of how each man’s nature has been shaped through his attempts to make meaning of his particular encounters with the natural world.
-Joe Benevento, author of The Cracker Box Poems

​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 realized, 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