Handiwork Poems
$15.99
Sale price
$15.99
Regular price
Skip to product information
From the Back Cover Jim Clark can move from lyrical wistfulness to comedy to narrative brilliance in a breath. Handiwork is more than handy work. It is masterful work-written with vision, mystery, and emotional breadth and power. Yet Jim Clark's poetry speaks in a language many will understand and enjoy.-Joe David Bellamy Jim Clark's Handiwork gathers together a tapestry of voices, voices that become as real in their poems as those of the friends and neighbors with whom we live every day: "The figure of the woman in the garden,/the brightly colored fruit poised at her lips,/is not archetypal-she is a friend of mine." In these lines from the book's title poem, we see the vision that guides this book and makes palpable the authenticity that resonates in each of the poems. In these lyrical narratives, Clark invites us into a world that ultimately opens into our own stories, their mysteries of loss and survival.-Kathryn Stripling Byer In poems such a "The Land Under the Lake" Jim Clark touches the buried depths of memory and family connections, and the heights of formal brilliance, poetic authority. There are many voices in Handiwork, exact and vivid, but the truest voice is Clark's own, authentic, powerful. The poems feel at once inevitable and very new, and the stories they tell are stories we cannot forget.-Robert Morgan Product Description Jim Clark's second collection of poems finds him in a more narrative and meditative mode, although the lyricism of his first collection, Dancing on Canaan's Ruins, is still much in evidence. The poems here tend to stretch out a bit, and afford him ample opportunity to explore the rich veins of experience contained in these landscapes and voices. There is a rough-hewn quality to many of these poems, but Clark's craftsmanship and control is everywhere apparent. The poems in Handiwork, in the words of the title poem, "move surely, methodically, knowing/what comes next." About the Author Jim Clark was born in Byrdstown, Tennessee, and educated at Vanderbilt University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the University of Denver. His poems and stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Appalachian Heritage, Now and Then, and in many other magazines and anthologies. He has been a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and received the Harriette Simpson Arnow award. He has taught at Auburn University, directed the creative writing program at the University of Georgia, and is presently Writer-in-Residence at Barton College, in Wilson, North Carolina. His first book of poems, Dancing on Canaan's Ruins, is now in its second printing. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Land Under the Lake --for my parents, on the occasion of their 50th Wedding Anniversary I think of Noah, his family spared, Riding that bark of gopher wood above The good lands of home, now submarine, paired Beasts below waiting for news of the dove. Less sublime than God's wondrous instruction, The voice of the Washington bureaucrat Told of the Dale Hollow Dam's construction- Good farms, long held, flooded in nothing flat. One summer on a houseboat we drifted Over barns and churches, cornfields and cribs, Swam down, down, to where gauzy light sifted Like silt through some barn's or house's ribs. Marriage is an ark, with children safe below, And love is the land lying under the lake. In the little drowned chapel years ago My mother and father slice their wedding cake.
Handiwork Poems
$15.99
Sale price
$15.99
Regular price