Poetry by Tom Clark

October 1, 1987 • 6 x 9 • 148 pages • 978-0-918273-27-7

Poems written between 1962 and 1987 encompassing Clark’s full range of concerns: life and death, love and regrets, history and 20th-century society.

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 the 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 doing 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.”

About the Author

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.

Some of Clark’s previous books include The World of Damond Runyon (biography, Harper & Row), Jack Kerouac (biography, Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich), Who is Sylvia? (Blue Wind Press), and The Exile of Celine (Random House).

Reviews

“It is perhaps because he is so purely Puritan that his work appeals to the young; they understand his contempt for everything that is comfortable, fleshly, dying. . . . Clark is among the very few of our contemporaries who write poems of awesome grace.” —American Book Review