The Destruction of Time is the second of Tom Morgan's "trilogy of time poems". The first, Not of Our Time was published in 1989. On the cover was Victor Vasnetsov's 1882 painting Warrior at the Cross-roads. In a desolate rocky landscape, a weary knight and his tired horse stop before an inscribed stone marker: "If you go left, you will lose your horse. If you go right, you will lose your head". Morgan has spent a lifetime wrestling with this conundrum, maneuvering in ways so as not to lose his horse or his head. He has learned the struggle forward for socialist justice includes the journey of return; to the land, to real work, to family, and to a more direct connection with divinity.
James Moore, Director Emeritus, Albuquerue Museum of Arts and History
As Ibn' Arabi calls attention to imagination; the "barzakh (the in between) or 'isthmus' from the sensible form to the invisible meaning...from the visible to the hidden, from the less real to the more real." p110 Towards a Jewish-Christian-Muslim Theology (David Burrell)
Thomas Morgan's The Destruction of Time is a book written in a style that fittingly imbues the chameleonic nature of poetry, jazz and what is in-between. The author captures in his writing an admixture of jazz, poetry and the in-between, leaving it up to the reader to adapt to either be or play before or after words.
Read this book and experience how the propensity of narrative and poetry liken to jazz, its changes depending and determining mood and sensibilities.
Dr. Umar Al-Khatab, Jazz Flutist and Imam Emeritus, Mosque of The Dawn
Morgan's work is a sometimes joyful and sometimes heartbreaking deconstruction of the human experience marked across decades of poignant moments in time.
Tom's latest book of poetry is epic free verse of the spirit adroitly laying out how the consciousness of the Sixties defeated war markers in Vietnam and smashed segregation in America. The Destruction of Time blazes a path towards social justice during some of our darker time with an ode to the incendiary jazz that helped light the way.
Jon Robeson, Executive Director of Arts Illiana (in nominating Morgan for the
Indiana Arts Commissions's Indiana Poet Laureate.)
