In Terra Firma, Selected by Denise Levertov for the National Poetry Series and winner of the 1991 American Book Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award, Thomas Centolella establishes a mature vision, with narratives and meditations that seek a communal condition. In poems spoken intimately, as though to a friend, Centolella balances between the stoical and the sentimental, visiting a "permanent" earth which remains forever temporal in human experience, searching for the sacramental, redemptive experience that binds apparent opposites.
