The Shades Of Memory

About the Book

About the Author

Jacob L. Thomas used to think that poetry was useless. He assumed that poems were either poor children’s rhyme schemes like “Hey-Diddle-Diddle,” or worse, “Happy in Heaven” elegies that make it on the cover of funeral programs. But after attending a poetry workshop in May 2009 at Utah State University, Jacob discovered that poems were much more than that. “I learned that poems can communicate emotions and thoughts that are difficult to describe in prose,” he said. “Whether they rhyme or not, all of my poems are embedded with deep themes.” Jacob became a writer after giving up on a career as an astronaut in 8th grade. During high school, he found an affinity for journalism and newspaper, coupling his budding writing skills with an interest in politics. “All that time I thought my true love was political science,” he said. “But it wasn’t until 2008 that I realized that I more so loved the writing and the words than the politics and the events.” He has always been an avid reader, devoting hours to books and study since early childhood. He still has a great fondness for books he was introduced to at a young age, especially J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. His interest in poetry was kindled while staying at his grandparents’ over Thanksgiving break in 2008. His grandfather’s wife had a book that contained 100 of the world’s greatest poems. Jacob read many, recorded a few in his journal, and set to work. “The Shades of Memory” was his first poem, crafted that Christmas. “Everyone had gone home for the holidays and the dorm that I lived in was completely empty,” he described. “I could hear the college bell tolling, which I never could when others were around. I would walk down the sidewalks and the school paths and think of all the memories that I had created that semester and friends that I’d made. But I was alone, and all these memories were just ghosts.” The first poem launched several others, and over the course of the next few months he had written some 75 poems. He started a blog to share them with others, and the general response was so favorable that he decided it was time to self-publish. “When I talked to the consultant with Xlibris, I think he thought I was some accomplished author or something,” Jacob said. “But when I told him that I’d only been writing poems for a year, he was quite surprised.” The Shades of Memory, a collection of his poems named after his original, explores life in hindsight—those memorial “ghosts” he experienced while traversing the paths of his memory. “A lot of my poems in that book are based off my memories,” he said. “An old lady I used to watch toddle up and down our street in New Zealand, a squawking crow I heard on vacation at Arches National Monument, or visiting my grandma’s grave alone for the first time. Each experience has a certain vividness that I used to write my poems.” Other poems represent the experiences of historical figures, like Tsar Nicholas II, Joseph Smith, Alexander Hamilton, and others. “There’s something about each of those stories that compels us to think about our own lives,” Jacob said. “We may not have been fearful traveling to face someone in a duel, but we’ve had moments of nervousness heading off to something unknown. We may not have succeeded to the office of President of the United States, but we’ve all felt at times like the world is crashing down on us.” And yet other poems explore the souls of the natural world. The diversity of Jacob’s poetic presentation is mostly what makes The Shades of Memory so compelling. Still, the author claims there is one common thread in each of his poems: the images. “Humans think in pictures,” he explains. “When we remember an old friend, we picture him. When we think of an experience, we picture the place we were at. Whenever we deposit a new memory, it’s based on something we’ve seen. When we read, our minds immediately create a world of images inside our heads that help us make sense of what we are reading. Memories are images, images are human experience.” The Shades of Memory is Jacob’s first widely published and distributed book, yet he hopes that many others will follow. “I have heaps of stories to tell,” he said. “This one happens to be about memory.”