Although I
may slip up and use the word from time to time, “Poem366” is not a series of book
reviews. A review is something very different from these little essays, which I
refer to as “appreciations.”
As a
journalism major, I was trained up in reviewing in what was probably my
favorite course in the curriculum. The 300-level class was called “Review and
Criticism,” and it was held one night a week. Most of what we did was watch classic
movies — All About Eve, Citizen Kane, that kind of thing — and
then write reviews about them. I hadn’t seen those films, so the course was
doubly educational for me.
But we
also talked about the ethics of reviewing, and it was made very clear that a
review relies on trust. Audiences need to be able to trust reviewers not to
have a financial stake in what they’re reviewing, be it a restaurant, movie, or
what have you, and they should also trust that they’re getting a
straightforward look at the subject, both the good and the bad, with the writer’s
personal concerns not mixing too much with the job of reviewing.
Although I
come from, and work again in, the journalism world, I’ve spent a lot of time
tooling around on the literary scene, and I’ve found the ethics here to be
quite different. Friends review friends all the time; I’ve even been in
Facebook groups where people have attempted to swap reviews — you do me and I’ll
do you.
Whether in
blurbs or “reviews,” you’ll find very few poetry collections that aren’t
luminous (or numinous) and essential. We seldom get the straight poop, because
I read a lot of collections with language that could use some tightening or
imagery that misses the mark or rhetoric that lacks precision and logic, but
these are said to be as numinous as all of the others.
In the
Poem366 project, I’m offering a taste of the work that I am reading and
enjoying. (What I’m reading and not enjoying, I just skip over and don’t
mention here.) There is a lot to like in most poetry collections, and I love to
see what I can learn from anything I pick up. What I find, I share with you.
Because I’m
really just being a fan instead of a critic in these little essays, I am free to
bring you some things I would never find ethically appropriate to review. One
of those is today’s selection, A Finitude of Skin by Clayton Adam Clark.
This collection is the winner of the Moon City Press Poetry Award, and I am the
series editor for that award. With my partner Lanette Cadle, I chose this collection
as the prize winner, and I edited it in close partnership with Clayton himself.
I feel very connected to this book, and I’m excited to share it with the world.
Could I
review this book? Never. Can I love it and tell you about it? Yep. And right
now I’m going to do just that.
A Finitude of Skin by Clayton Adam
A Finitude
of Skin by Clayton
Adam Clark (Springfield, Missouri: Moon City Press, 2018).
Clayton Adam Clark writes beautifully about place, and I
know this because I’ve been to many of the places this Missouri poet writes
about in A Finitude of Skin, the winner of the 2018 Moon City Press
Poetry Award.
I helped to choose Clark’s collection for the MCP prize, and
I did so on the basis of his careful use of language — no extraneous words or
syllables here — and his lush imagery. But I think I was most impressed by his keen
understanding of the environment, which he describes in precise and scientific
terms.
The tone of the book is set in the
first three lines of “The River of Ugly Fishes,” the first poem in the book:
Blame it on the limestone—the sinkholes,
Blame it on the limestone—the sinkholes,
the speleological interest, an
overwhelming
karstness here. People get lost.
I’ve lived in Missouri for eight years, and this seems true
to me. The state has a way of taking us in, and it can also feel a little hard
to get away from.
Clark writes about a hellbender (giant salamander) that is new
to the region, and the way he presents it makes a reader feel as though it’s
right in front of her:
The
snot otter, grampus,
devil dog can
breathe underwater
without gills,
lungs only for floating,
and most closely resembles
crayfish-eating
petrified wood.
Until it swims. …
There’s nothing wooden
in a hellbenders
wiggle work upstream,
the backbone soft,
the little flesh around
infused with capillaries
that filter
oxygen.
Clark writes like a naturalist, or like a journalist whose
beat is the disappearing world.
Another favorite poem of mine is the multipart “The
Noctambulists.” Here, too, Clark writes with meticulous care about nature, this
time about an unexpected Missouri denizen: sharks.
Bull sharks swim up
the Mississippi, singular
in their blood’s
regulation of salt in freshwater.
The northernmost
shark caught on record
was hooked on the
Illinois side near the Piasa Bird,
a
fish-bird-reptile-deer painted on a bluff
in red-black-green.
It’s a real petroglyph, and bull sharks on the Mississippi are
well documented, too, but for some reason, Clark can write about simple facts
and make them seem not just unlikely, but wondrous.
The poet’s appreciation for scientific detail even shows up in
a beautiful love poem, “7-10 Years.” Writes Clark,
There’s nothing
left of your skeleton
from the day we
met. Every cell
forming, your
spinal column, your femurs
and scapulae, has
been replaced.
Your blood
traversed the thousand miles
of your body and died
in your spleen
again and again,
and I’m sorry
I never saw you
change.
It’s certainly a strange sentiment, but so tender and loving
that I fall a little in love with the voice of the poem myself. If there were a
prom somewhere, I’d ask this guy to it.
The end of this poem shows that the poet’s philosophical
range extends beyond details and data into deeper waters. After explaining how
the body regenerates every seven to ten years, he concludes,
What I can’t let go of
is if we want to change
the people
we have been, we
don’t have to.
Change will come, whether we want it to or not, whether that’s
in our fading natural world or in each other. It’s a thought that’s as
horrifying as it is comforting.
No comments:
Post a Comment