Feeling for the Ground by Tom Clark

“Pretty much exactly like Tom Thumb’s Blues, Mr. Clark goes on as ever letting his sensibility seep like rain through all the great American vernacular sites — film noir, baseball, the shore, dreams — and the result is a sequence of utterances that feel both timeless and inexhaustibly resonant.”

—Jonathan Lethem

Tom Clark’s Feeling for the Ground gives us delicate and ultimate statements
such as
      Out beyond the stars the universe watches,
       Counting beats of strange hearts between pitches
from the poem, “Time Rotates But there Is only One Season.”
These vital ruminations help the reader to decipher what is really going on in his or her own world through works that do not exhaust the reader, but refresh the mind through their ceaseless motion from veiled vale to misty height.
You can use this book to help Understand.

—Ed Sanders

Like Anubis, Tom Clark is a walker between worlds. His poems operate in the interstices between the real and the virtual, sleep and waking, art and life. His writing is a kind of night vision able to penetrate the façade of surfaces even as he perfectly replicates them. In part, at least, this is a book that feels written with the ink of tears — not in a sentimental or manipulative way — but rather in a way that restores our humanity, or as Clark says: “What crying has that dying lacks is a coming back to life.”

—Elaine Equi

Poems of such profound grace reduce me to tears. One feels one is reading Tom Clark with one’s soul first (and then with one’s eyes and mind). These poems give readers a lightly-embodied spirit’s clean, lucid, beautiful voice as it traverses the world, now floating over perfectly observed scenes, now at ground zero, now checking in with stray cats and the homeless rolling fog and other denizens of the quotidian. Clark has refined the lyric voice, and customized it to our time. How poems composed of…

1. Such flawlessly measured breaths
2. Deep, gorgeous resignation
3. The interplay between swooping freedom of thought and the fathomless inevitable
4. A sense of eternity, self abnegation and wonder
5. Supernatural acuity of conscience and wit
…get written is beyond me. I only know I am amazed and grateful.

—Amy Gerstler

_________________

Tom Clark was born in Chicago in 1941 and educated at the University of Michigan, Cambridge University and the University of Essex. He has worked variously as an editor (The Paris Review), critic (Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle) and biographer (lives of Damon Runyon, Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn), has written novels (Who is Sylvia?, The Exile of Céline, The Spell) and essays (The Poetry Beat, Problems of Thought: Paradoxical Essays). His many collections of poetry have included Stones, Air, At Malibu, John’s Heart, When Things Get Tough on Easy Street, Paradise Resisted, Disordered Ideas, Fractured Karma, Sleepwalker’s Fate, Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats, Like Real People, Empire of Skin, Light and Shade, The New World and Something in the Air. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and partner of forty-two years, Angelica Heinegg.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 108 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402961

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