description: Selected work from Tom Clark’s first quarter century of writing, from songs of innocence published when he was twenty-five (”Lake Life, I want to take a bath/ In you and forget death”) to lines reflecting the disappointments and compromises of middle age (”While everything external/ dies away in the far off/ echo of the soul/ still there's a mill wheel turning/ . . . / by some distant stream/ a note of peace/ in a life which/ will never be peaceful”).The book is divided into two the generous ”New Poems, 1986–1991,” which collects recent lyrics mourning the passing of time, the trials of insomnia, the sad politics of poetry, and the sadder poetry of politics; and ”Dark Continent, 1965–1986,” Clark's judicious winnowing of his earlier work (on love, baseball, classicism, jazz, physics, trout kills, popular culture, and Catholic-Zen-antinomian mysticism). Between the two comes a ferocious prose poem, ”Diary of Desert War, 1990–1991,” written in the terse, telegraphic style of the Times Square news zipper––that is, of a news zipper in the hands of a surrealist op-ed poet.
language: English
title: Sleepwalkers Fate: New and Selected Poems, 1965-1991
titlecomplete: Sleepwalkers Fate: New and Selected Poems, 1965-1991
genres: Poetry
ratings_count: 8
publisher: Black Sparrow Pr