Reviews and Comments on Through Thunder by Tav Sparks

Through poetry, we are able to touch deep archetypal places which ignite both memory and the imagination. Through Thunder is an epic poem which evokes the timeless archetype of death/rebirth in a way that reduces fear and reflects the resilience of the human spirit.

~Angeles Arrien, Ph.D., Cultural Anthropologist, Author of The Four-Fold Way and The Second Half of Life.

With skillful poetics and spiritual authenticity, Tav Sparks guides us through realms where archetypes and galaxies vibrate within us, and the psyche and the sacred intertwine. The passion and majesty of Sparks’ mythic language evokes a feeling of universes blooming between the cells of your body.

~Drew Dellinger, Founder of Poets for Global Justice, author of Love Letter to the Milky Way.

Through Thunder is a modern odyssey, fierce, honest, and filled with stunning imagery and language. Tav Sparks guides us through his spiritual crisis and redemption with powerful poetry, making his personal journey universal, speaking to us all.

~Wes Nisker, Author, Buddha’s Nature, Crazy Wisdom

The images and sound flows of this poem light up the soul’s dark night like lightning, in glows and flashes, while leaving that dark night’s landscape in place. We sense the proximity of solid shapes in strange territory, much as a blind person exploring a new home. We both bear and transcend the paradoxical, spiritual/material puzzle of the soul and the body. Our minds read the thunder words a few seconds after they have gashed through our layers of dependence on one-dimensional meaning.

~Kylea Taylor, Author of The Ethics of Caring and The Breathwork Experience

Through Thunder takes us on one man’s journey into the darkness and out again into the light, a journey with which many of us can easily identify. Every line is filled with deep emotion and fierce imagery that ignites the inner fire, that pushes us towards the death/rebirth experience through which we must all pass.
 
~Jai Uttal, world musician and
Grammy-nominated recording artist..

Review of Through Thunder in The Inner Door May 2005

Tav Sparks, writing these poems twenty years ago in the mid-1980s, has gifted us with a hero’s journey set in a landscape familiar to those of us who have traveled the non-ordinary path. If in any doubt that we all drink from a common pool, this epic poem will confirm that we are all of us one being with one heart; all we have to do is examine our dreams to know the common bond.

It is a difficult poem to read, at times. The images come fast and layered, the words are perfect and hint at more than is available in language. It reads like a series of long breathwork sessions, jig-sawing into a rich mosaic, tugging in many directions, making meaning in the way an intricate mandala would, by an absorbing of the whole, by a waiting to see what an image does to mind and body. For me, it was hard to read from beginning to end and expect a linear unfolding. I read parts of it, went back to some, moved quickly through others; I roamed the landscape, glad that I could always come back again. And yes, I wanted to know how it would end. Salvation? Enlightenment? As I read, I got close enough to the narrator so that I really hoped for deliverance, knowing that it would be important for the rest of us.

Some areas were completely familiar:

The pounding into rubble of a thousand worlds
By the clenched fist,
The raised arm baptized in the river of rock,
Red hot,
That makes fury pale

Some were puzzling: I await the roar of the iron horse and The roar of shells and banshees leaving hell

Tav is obviously a poet’s poet, playing with sound and meter, the words precise, the images perfectly clear. Dense as it sometimes gets, there is not a word out of place or an unnecessary phrase. Many parts are simply gorgeous poetry, lyrical and heart-warming. I found great pleasure from the reading because I could sometimes hear the sounds of other, older poems ringing through this one. Homer, Neruda, Sir. Edwin Arnold, even Ginsberg. It is the joy of reading the work of a writer who has read much and imbibed it all. The snowy crags of Satulah are Macchu Picchu, the Himalayas and Mt. Olympus; the traveler falling down the sides of the mountain is an Odysseus searching for home, a Dionysius longing for his mother. But this poem is different in that it is couched in the terms of non-ordinary journeying and does not attempt to make itself accessible to linear, logical analysis. With those other, older, works, the reader must part the veil of story to get to the metaphor; Through Thunder serves it right up. The reader is not given much time to interpret as the journey unravels itself.

The hero of Through Thunder is a low-fold chakra gardener, an inter-galactic beggar. He must survive fire and ice, hell and even heaven. He longs for death, which does not come satisfyingly. It is the familiar longing for death with the promise of spiritual re-birth, described better than I’ve heard before:

It’s true.
Death’s moment is elusive.
I’ve kept vigil on the corner of my eye
For much time now,
To catch it
And there is sweet advice, coming to us in words we know well:
Go in,
On the breath dance.
Let death in,
Let it push you over.
Spread your arms to it through the sick of your gut.
Strain out,
More, further, out!
...
And keep falling until you are no more.

~Review by Sharanya Naik, Author of Old Songs