By Michael Lavers

Newly Not Eternal, the second collection by George David Clark, is a book in which time has burned the dross away. The poems look small, but like Blake’s grain of sand each holds a world. The prologue poem, “Mosquito,” is a manifesto which, with its childlike music and theological contrariness, I think the author of “The Fly” would recognize:

                              God was only acting godly
                              when he strapped a dirty needle
                              to the fly
                              and taught it how to curtsy
                              on our knees and elbows

                              on our necks and earlobes
                              so politely that it hardly
                              stirs an eye.
                              God was hard but speaking softly
                              when He told us we should die.

It’s like Paradise Lost covered by Ariel, Shakespeare’s most musical character. Most of the poems have that spirit’s melodic drive, sitting somewhere between nursery-rhymes and spells.

If poetry is language whose meaning is its sound, then Newly Not Eternal is a paragon of the art. “Gardensong,” for example, is four stanzas of pure musical refrain:

                              in the gardens
                                        in the gardens
                              you are walking
                                        you are walking
                              through the roses
                                        to the roses . . .

There is no meaning to this apart from its music, language played on like an instrument, suspending, warping, or correcting time’s flow–and the damage that flow does–with stubborn sonic circularity.

This is the first thing readers will notice about this book: its insistence on poetry as primarily a sonic art. Frost claimed that “the ear is the only true writer and the only true reader,” and Clark knows it. In “Kaleidoscope” we read of how the children’s toy expands our sight, but this could equally apply to what these poems do for our hearing, how they attune us to new or age-old frequencies, tight spiraling fractals of sound:

                                                  Light,
                              spit in dust, apply

                              the mud into my sight,
                              and cake me blind

                              enough to witness
                              all a pupil hides.

And yet despite their sonic fabergé, plain speech is never far away. We can almost always follow the coils of Clark’s thinking, and the poems are easy to read out loud. Once in a while, though, there’s a passage so distilled, so clotted with rhyme, the sense gets slightly lost:

                              Given snow
                              that doesn’t flinch
                              to throw its pounds
                              through heaven inch
                              by inch, that sows
                              a billion motes
                              of chill into
                              the ground man can’t
                              defend; and given
                              wind that won’t
                              begin to tell
                              us how it’s driven,
                              where it fell from,
                              what it’s meant
                              to blow and which
                              proud limbs the clouds
                              want riven since
                              it doesn’t dimly
                              know . . .

Everything rhymes with everything else, and in this blizzard of echoes, I not only lose track of where we started, but I start predicting how the song will go: that “given” will lead to “driven” and “riven,” and that “snow” is overture for “throw,” “sows,” “blow,” and “know.” Impressed as I am with his ability to get the rhymes in, I sometimes wish he’d kept a few more out.

Maybe that’s not quite fair, like Emperor Joseph complaining of a Mozart opera: “too many notes.” Too many is the point. So why complain? To put the lie to that age-old belief that English is rhyme-poor is no minor achievement. Page for page, there may be more sonic ricochets in this book than in Dante.

This musical extravagance counterbalances all the minuteness that the poems in other ways embrace. In addition to “Mosquito,” there are poems on an eyelash, keys, freckles, babies, an ultrasound photo, a postcard. There’s a poem called “Small God,”

                              Small enough to crawl
                              in through the pet door

                              to my mind when I’m
                              all locked, so small

                              it nests a migraine
                              in my pillow, galls

                              my hallways like a noisy
                              clock . . .

Rarely do the lines in this book get longer than this, and not for nothing: these slivered forms enact a central theme, time’s “blade / that pares / your prime away // in sighs, dead skin, / and sweat.” The razor-thin shapes might make us feel that time is paring us down too, but is it? Eliot reminds us that “Time the destroyer is time the preserver,” and this is another contrary Clark’s book embraces:

                              Now only feels
                              so hot a minute
                              when it’s clear
                              we braise
                              forever in it.

Try to grasp the present and it’s nowhere to be found. And yet, the present is the only thing that never ends. The rhymes function in this way too, to underscore the tension between the words that keep on going and the sounds that keep staying the same, a paradox with which Clark’s constantly at play.

And yet the play (like Ariel’s) is often sad. Just like in great nursery rhymes, Blake’s songs, and Dickinson’s hymns, the sense of fun offsets the red-hot core of grief fueling the music. The following lines are from a half-crown of sonnets dedicated to a son, one of a pair of twins, who died at birth. Here, and throughout the crown, Clark contrasts the living son’s presence to the dead son’s absence:

                              The crumpled books
                                        and cracker crumbs are proof

                              he’s loose . . .disordered
                                        blocks, a toppled chair . . .

                              Some days he’s absolutely
                                        everywhere

                              until I wish him gone,
                                        to tell the truth.

                              Not you. You stay
                                        exactly as you’re left:

                              the tame and quiet twin,
                                        the easy one,

                              the boy who never
                                        makes a mess, the son

                              whose whispered name
                                        will be our shibboleth

                              for innocence, whose
                                        only fault is done,

                              who never cries, or fights,
                                        or takes a breath.

Lines like this remind us what life is for and what love is. A straightforward task for a work of art, but one all-too-rarely achieved. Notice too that the splicing of the sonnet form isn’t incidental but an embodiment of the loss itself, a way to turn each line into a set of twins, making the absent child present again.

These sonnets are without a doubt the strongest poems in the book. And yet their grief is counterbalanced by a joy that pervades nearly every page. William James wrote: “The world is good, we must say, since it is what we make it—and we shall make it good.” Clark is engaged in that very making. He is a pessimist who refuses to stay sad, a believer who lets us hear God “crying while He laughs.” Innocence harmonizes with experience, creating a hope we can trust, a happiness that knows death. “Death’s / cliches belabor // alleluias,” he writes at the conclusion of a backwards abecedarian. The sentiment is earnest and redemptive, but it’s the form that shows off all the fun Clark’s had while making it.

And so it’s not really paradise lost the book presents us with as much as paradise regained, remade, insisted on. Dickinson describes her “Occupation” as “The spreading wide my narrow Hands / To gather Paradise,” and in these narrow poems Clark tries to gather everything that counts. Things slip outside that grasp, of course, but so they must. A human life is not eternal, but Clark is sure that if we get the words right, something of our departed, of our love for them, will carry on:

                              I feel compelled

                              to tell the room
                                        it’s missing you, to mark

                              the vacuum with a few
                                        more decibels

                              of Henry, Henry,
                                        Henry Thomas Clark.

---

Michael Lavers is the author of After Earth and The Inextinguishable, both published by the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Southwest Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He has been awarded the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, the Moth Poetry Prize, and the Bridport Poetry Prize.