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Easter
Sunday
Poems
by Tom Clark
"Tom
Clark's work is like one of those legendary hardware
stores that is said to have everything on its shelves.
If you were to pick a subject out of thin air and wonder
whether a contemporary poet has written about it, chances
are that one of Clark's books has it in stock. And Easter
Sunday may be his most eclectic book yet. . . . Eclecticism
in itself can be as tiresome as obsessions or narrow
interests, however. It needs to be informed by intelligence,
and in Easter Sunday it is, for the most part. It is
also informed with considerable wit, passion and anger.
One rarely, if ever, has the sense here that Clark is
either feigning interest in a subject or, like the worst
Workshop Poets, mindlessly proving for the umpteenth
time that poetry can be written about anything . . .
these poems are worth return engagements because Clark
himself is so genuinely engaged with the subjects from
which the poems spring. His best and most ambitious
collection of poems to date." - Hans Ostrom, The
San Francisco Chronicle
Easter
Sunday joins recent poems by Tom Clark with rediscovered
and revised earlier poems to form a book that expresses
the abiding spirit of this poet's entire work. "One
comes more and more to think of a poet as somebody who's
not so much owner or proprietor as simple custodian
of poems entrusted to his care by the language,"
Clark says. "Another way of saying this is that
the poet's proper work is listening to the conversation
that takes place between the parts of the poem he's
set in motion, and moving everything he can to further
that dialogue. . . . That kind of listening work tends
to go on for a lifetime, and the poems in Easter Sunday
represent a project only slightly less lengthy, 1962-1987,
to be exact."
Tom Clark has served as poetry editor of The Paris Review and as a poetry critic for the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle. He is a widely published poet who has also released a number of critical biographies, including lives of baseball great Mark Fidrych and writers Jack Kerouac and Charles Olson. He lives in Berkeley.
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