rowing with either oar

by tom schmidt

Our tiny crafts float between either oar: loss and hope, faith and doubt, choice and fate, memory and longing, galaxy and grain. Here are poems that speak of either one person’s story or every person’s story.

praise for rowing with either oar

Though this may be a first book, Rowing with Either Oar is mature work, both intelligent and technically deft. Schmidt has a theologian’s mind: not a churchy mind that too often makes “Christ invisible” by claiming one aspect of Christianity over another, but a mind that entertains the largest questions: is life ordered and meaningful or is it random and culturally created (the two oars of the title)? Schmidt’s credo is “what I see is what I get,” but his “seeing” includes a daughter’s death and the grief he knows must be embraced as well as the unavoidable sorrows of this world. In short, these poems are “earned;” they understand all too well there’s only one choice: “Into each lifted palm falls only rain/Enough to drink or drown, praise or complain.” Tom Schmidt chooses to drink and praise and attend to the fullness of our world of “ten thousand things.”  

—ROBERT CORDING, author of The Unwalled City

In a perfect blend of humor and sadness and elegiac wisdom, Tom Schmidt puts the vicissitudes of earthly life before our eyes with the same kind of beauty and longing found in the verse of Thomas Hardy. Except, unlike Hardy, in spite of the tragedies of existence, Schmidt has not given up on the possibility of a Logos, a big and all-embracing Word that subsumes and gives poignant meaning to all our little, ephemeral ones.  The poems in Rowing with Either Oar will keep you afloat and keep you hoping long after the book itself, and the author with it, has come ashore.

—PAUL J. WILLIS, author of Losing Streak

Tom Schmidt’s Rowing with Either Oar sings with technical skill and speaks gently from grief. In this fine collection of poems, both humorous and sober, we glimpse a poetical intelligence familiar with darkness yet attuned to grace—a distinct, authentic, and generous voice.

—BRAD DAVIS, author of Trespassing on the Mount of Olives

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