{"id":522,"date":"2018-03-24T12:20:22","date_gmt":"2018-03-24T16:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=522"},"modified":"2018-03-24T12:20:22","modified_gmt":"2018-03-24T16:20:22","slug":"review-of-the-canopy-by-patricia-clark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=522","title":{"rendered":"Review of The Canopy by Patricia Clark"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Patricia Clark. The Canopy. <\/em>Terrapin Books, 2017. 77 pgs. $16.00.<\/p>\n

Patricia Clark\u2019s most recent collection, The Canopy, <\/em>is filled with nature\u2014trees, birds, flowers\u2014and with death\u2014or perhaps not death so much as dying, or perhaps moreso the residue of death and dying. The poems are precise, attentive to the physical world, and poignant. The book\u2019s thematic concerns\u2014how astonishing the fact of life, how profound and yet also how slight the difference between being alive and no longer being alive\u2014are effectively developed because of Clark\u2019s reliance on the concrete. Readers are seduced into appreciating the world as it is and then reminded of how temporarily we inhabit it.<\/p>\n

Clark introduces these themes cautiously. In the opening poem, \u201cKnives on the Irish Air,\u201d a prelude to the collection, the speaker hears the cry of her sister\u2019s name called across the morning, but it is only as the book develops that readers come to understand why such a sound would so catch the speaker\u2019s attention. Then the opening poem of the first section, \u201cBalance, January,\u201d seems less haunting than awe-struck and even a little humorous. Here is the poem in its entirety:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s stranger than you can account for,
\nbeing alive, a cold January morning and twenty
\nwild turkeys high up in white oaks,
\ntheir waking up stretches in half light\u2014
\nfirst unbending out of a hunched ball, then
\nunfurling a wing, the second, while the broad
\ntail sticks out, flares, judders up and down.
\nEveryone says how stupid they are, will drown
\nwhen it rains simply by gazing up. I can\u2019t
\ncall them beautiful\u2014but I grudgingly give them
\ncredit for the way they balance on brittle thin
\nbranches seemingly without fear. How to have
\npoise, to nestle down to rest on a fragile thing?<\/p>\n

The first straightforward line turns on the following phrase, \u201cbeing alive,\u201d which leads us (or at least led me) to expect a meditation on transcendence, which this poem may in its own way be. The bigger surprise, though, comes after the next line break, \u201ctwenty\u201d not a statement about temperature on this \u201ccold January\u201d day but leading instead to \u201cwild turkeys.\u201d Already, Clark has exploited the line break twice to suggest that this poem won\u2019t go where readers expect. Ten of these thirteen lines are devoted to a detailed and lyrical description of these turkeys, each line both magnificently concrete and sonically attractive, even sometimes playful. The speaker earns the reader\u2019s trust because she has been so attentive to her subject\u2014how else to narrate a turkey\u2019s early morning moves: \u201cfirst unbending out of a hunched ball, then \/ unfurling a wing, the second, while the broad \/ tail sticks out, flares, judders up and down.\u201d Rather than an object of ridicule, the turkey becomes almost glorious. The sounds as well as images in these lines draw out attention, first the short \u201cu\u201d in \u201cunbending\u2026hunched\u2026unfurling\u201d and then the series of accented syllables, \u201cbroad \/ tail sticks out, flares.\u201d The spondee here, in the exact center of the poem, insists that we pay attention\u2014and I love that later word, \u201cjudders.\u201d In the following lines, the speaker steps back, commenting rather than describing, responding to human interpretations of the world rather than to the world\u2019s opening up at dawn. Before the final question, she returns again to an alliterative image, \u201cthe way they balance on brittle thin \/ branches seemingly without fear.\u201d This line recalls the poem\u2019s title and reveals the lesson humans can learn even from such unlovely birds. \u201cBalance\u201d we\u2019re so often told is desirable, but the more important detail here is that the turkeys claim their comfortable place in the world \u201cwithout fear.\u201d That\u2019s what the speaker seems to envy, the turkeys\u2019 acceptance of the world\u2019s and their own fragility without any anxious grasping after security. \u201cBalance, January\u201d succeeds because Clark is careful with craft but also because the tone is both respectful and vulnerable. The speaker, we sense, is honest and so trustworthy.<\/p>\n

A trustworthy speaker is essential when a poetry collection explores the fraught territory of grief. Near the end of the collection, \u201cMy Sister\u2019s Earth Day\u201d presents the occasion of grief much more directly. The poem begins with an environmental reference that alludes to global warming and hints toward an ominous future through its central image: \u201cThat it was Earth Day and still the leading \/ edges of an iceberg fell into the sea with a hiss.\u201d The poem proceeds this way, primarily through sentence fragments, as if this transitional state between a body, a person, living and not living cannot be described with the grammatical fullness of a complete sentence. At its conclusion, the poem explores the mystery of our corporeal existence\u2014we are so much more than our bodies, and yet without our bodies we seem entirely gone. The moment of death is presented directly, leaving the reader stunned:<\/p>\n

And each of us, that we are not the body,
\nexactly, and yet through the skin, eyes,
\nhair, we love.<\/p>\n

That the clothes are not the person, nor objects,
\nbooks. Memory is the fixative.<\/p>\n

There she moves. There she stops breathing.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Sister\u2019s Earth Day\u201d is an exploration of grief and simultaneously an attempt to discover what it means exactly to be alive. We are alive as long as we are breathing perhaps, yet our bodies seem such poor representations of our selves. As Clark has stated in \u201cBalance, January,\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s stranger than you can account for, \/ being alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

The poems in The Canopy <\/em>are moving and memorable. Clark\u2019s skill with craft means that she can present difficult material effectively, without overwrought angst or false notes along the way. The individual poems are arranged so that the collection\u2019s power is cumulative. It\u2019s a thoughtful collection that will invite its readers toward thoughtful responses.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Patricia Clark. The Canopy. Terrapin Books, 2017. 77 pgs. $16.00. Patricia Clark\u2019s most recent collection, The Canopy, is filled with nature\u2014trees, birds, flowers\u2014and with death\u2014or perhaps not death so much as dying, or perhaps moreso the residue of death and dying. The poems are precise, attentive to the physical world, and poignant. The book\u2019s thematic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=522"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":524,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522\/revisions\/524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}