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VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW
Contemporary Poetry and Poetics



 
Review of Patricia Clark's Second Book of Poetry
 

~LAURIE MCDIARMID~



PATRICIA CLARK: MY FATHER ON A BICYCLE



 

The poet in My Father on a Bicycle is a quiet witness
of nature’s stunning violence, and we are reminded,
poem to poem, of our inclusion in that nature.
Like Frost, whom Clark evokes in an epigraph,
the poet’s eye records the stark beauty in death
and so participates in it.



Patricia Clark’s second volume of poetry, My Father on a Bicycle, has the same quiet intensity as her first; her elegies address her parents, living and dead, innocence, mortality, and work toward uncovering a spiritual connection with the other, a grace to transcend the ordinary violence of living. At the very least, grace is what the poet would like to bring back from this journey, the artist stepping past the viewer or reader “into the relentless dark,” the underworld, in order to bring back some vestige of what has been lost — the spirit, the other, the self.
    Many of the poems celebrate the incomplete and somewhat incoherent nature of this salvage job. Photographs, paintings, statues, postcards, gardens, neighborhoods, mountains, streams only partially document the journey and its losses: “Was it a kind of love to have saved / this stuff?” the poet wonders. “Or was it a reflex, blind, / instinctual, to hoard what’s been dear…” Clark’s voice captures the child’s intensity of first encounters and combines it with an adult’s survivor guilt. “Like a refugee in a wartorn country,” she writes, “I escaped” from that place — whether the dark country of childhood, of social erasure, of need and desire thwarted, of death — “without a glance back, taking only what I could grip in my hands, or remember.” And now her job seems to be to rediscover that place in the ordinary landscape of the backyard, the urban lake, the settled terrain of the Midwest.
    The volume’s title poem is a tender address to the lost father, his stork-like legs signifying a goofy abandon to experience in the driveway, his odd balance in the world encapsulated in the image of him fishing a stream, the “[d]eep, moving water his abiding friend.” In many of Clark’s poems, nature is a source of both nostalgia and bittersweet recognition of mortality, and birds, such as the robin Clark views as the shadow of a declining mother, are the “American Elegists” with which the poet identifies. These birds voice the ambivalent truth about our journey between life and death, and their song, a warbling “on the margins, slim, // of either waking or drifting off,” like Clark’s work, blends dream, sorrow, change, and delicate flowering. The song illustrates, in fragile but clear images, the “slow decline // any heart will go through, any forest or field, / the woman who has lifted many children up / now taken to rest, or nearly.”
    The poet in My Father on a Bicycle is a quiet witness of nature’s stunning violence, and we are reminded, poem to poem, of our inclusion in that nature. Like Frost, whom Clark evokes in an epigraph, the poet’s eye records the stark beauty in death and so participates in it.  She would like “[t]o live the death” of the toad, for example, “the thrash / in red” as the snake snaps it up. Clark reminds us of redemption’s bloody cost; she wants to “hunker down and yet be lifted up,” perhaps by the poignant details, the vivid smells, sounds, flavors, caresses of nature.  Nature, in these poems, has no heart, no feeling. The poet’s job is to provide that heart. In “Flies,” Clark reminds us that “the photo only breaks your heart / when more details are known,” and it seems, particularly in this volume, that heart's created through breaking.
    Though Clark turns an unflinching eye toward the brutal excesses of nature’s unfeeling rituals — and includes, at times, her parents, those she loves or has loved, and herself, in this unflinching examination — by the end of the volume even human actors who have caused pain are redeemed with gentle, natural images. The father who made a young girl’s rabbits scream lies in the middle of the road in another poem, a field mouse hiding in his pocket. “Two gentle natures, / the mouses’s and his” in a startlingly vulnerable symbiosis — this is how the poet chooses to remember her father.
    At times, the poems may seem too precious to bear the weight of witness, as in “days like flowers // or water, what you can’t hold before / it’s gone.” But this fragility is an illusion, like the unnamed flowers at the side of an “idle” summer road that the poet casually names. Underneath the flowers and the meditative poems is the steely sentence that, painful as it is, needed to be said, arranged now in a bouquet.
    Finally, Clark’s poems remind us of nature’s endurance, of the brutal promise implied in each dying flower, each murdered toad. “I believe in perennials,” the poet announces. My Father on a Bicycle makes me believe in them, too.

Clark, Patricia. My Father on a Bicycle.  East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2005.  ISBN: 0-87013-741-7   $19.95
 
 
 

© by Laurie McDiarmid
 
 


 
 

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