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
