Light and Shade: New and Selected Poems

by Tom Clark, Amy Gerstler (Introduction)

Overview

Essential for all readers of progressive American poetry, this collection encompasses the exhilaration and joy, the madness and sorrow of the last forty years with a lyric intensity that, in the words of the poet Robert Creeley, offers a “wry and securing truth.” A generous selection from the poet’s career, Light and Shade is a major release from one of the country’s most influential poets and critics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566891837
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	04/01/2006
Pages:	378
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

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 has published numerous poetry collections and a number of critical biographies, including lives of baseball great Mark Fidrych and writers Jack Kerouac and Charles Olson. He lives in Berkeley and teaches at New College of California. Amy Gerstler is a literary critic whose own poetry has received a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Editorial Reviews

Disarmingly casual yet saturated with loss, Clark's body of work revels in simplicities: lovers, friends, cities and landscapes (New York, Southern California, the Southwest), baseball, basketball, modern painters, sad weather, brief visions and ethereal promises. All make repeat appearances in a poetry rooted at once in spontaneity and in High Romantic aspiration. A rising star in the 1960s (when he served as poetry editor for the Paris Review), Clark is optimistic, even mystical, in his first books, then got quieter and gloomier later, crafting a tired, even baffled poetry to suit what one poem calls his "New West," where "The poor remedy of days can't ease us," and "places sometimes speak to you most deeply/ Just when you are about to leave." Late work looks over and over at the mood of the moment, even at the weather, watching gray and white fog or clear skies "While everything external/ dies away in the far off/ echo of the soul." (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This generous selection of works dating from 1963 concludes with about 75 new poems that reflect the cutting-edge Clark's wry, muscular style while shading into the mythic. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal