Mark Thalman

Your collection is alive all the way through: I got a great read out of it!  Certain
things stay with me, especially-- the trip over Highway 20, and the sun through
the high church window when the blast clears . . .  There are many worthy places
ready to receive so strong a collection.

                                                                        -- William Stafford
                                                                        Poet Laureate of the United States

There's a quality in all of Mark Thalman's poems that's like glacier water.  There's
clarity here and deceptive depth.  Many of his poems remind me of my old friends
William Stafford and Gary Snyder with their precise reverence for language and
the natural world.  It's the kind of work that you can take a walk with, each poem
a journey, each journey a discovery.

                                                                       -- Joseph Bruchac
                                                                       Poet, Novelist, Native American Storyteller

Mark Thalman's poetry makes one feel what it is to be a part of an endlessly
intricate, infinitely subtle and ultimately sustaining whole.  Catching the Limit
harrows us with awareness of our human insignificance in time and in the vastness of nature.  It is a book which sustains us with the sense that we belong.

                                                                      -- Ralph Salisbury 
                                                                      Professor Emeritus, University of Oregon

No one understands better than Mark Thalman the "ancestral messages"
of landscape in his native Oregon, gathered here from a lifetime of attentiveness.
Like river stones in a jar of water, glistening in the sun, his poems remind us
of what endures.  They will hold you steady, return you to the origins of wonder.

                                                                     -- Ingrid Wendt
                                                                     Editor, From Here We Speak:
                                                                     An Anthology of Oregon Poetry