Patricia Clark’s latest poetry collection
O Lucky Day explores her concerns about family and mortality, silence and loneliness, widening to include losses in the natural world. These sorrows often emerge along with an exuberance found in the sensual pleasures of taste and touch. Clark trains herself “to disappear, into the shagbark / hickory, the scarred maple, / the viburnum just about to flower.” She knows that whatever upheaval we bring to the world, and ourselves, “something was broken, then healed, then / transformed.” She advises us to “loaf and ponder, ” but also to rise with the rustling grasses in lament of environmental degradation, voicing our insistence for reverence of what remains. These lyric poems of intensity and acute detail render the physical world in its tattered glory.
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Contents
ix Oxygen: Letter to My Husband After a Quarrel
I.
1 Forest Bathing
2 Juneberry Leaves as Gold Coins
3 Sea Urchin
5 The Wind Phone
6 Poem Beginning with a Line from Adam Zagajewski
7 Fathering
8 Because What We Do Lives On
9 Silver-Tipped Japanese Grass
10 Give Me a Face to Cover My Face
12 Quarentena
13 Sailor
14 Astronomy “In Perfect Silence”
15 Soldier Boy
17 Inscape, with Birdsong
18 I Consider Pruning the Magnolia Tree and Instead
Take a Nap
19 After My Husband Tries His New Electric Shaver
21 Passing Royalty: Una Sfilata di Due
23 Each Day I Undress
25 Portrait of My Lover as a Promenade Along the Sea
26 Char
27 Love Poem to a Red Fox
II.
31 Wrack Line
III.
37 When the Great Poet Is Gone from the Earth
39 Centers of Gold
40 Italian Madonna
42 Gold Espadrilles
43 Elegy Not to Be Written
44 What My Father Wished For
45 Painter Joan Mitchell Pulls Me Up
47 My Sister’s Osprey
48 Our Next Breath
50 You Can’t Have Everything You Want
51 Hokusai’s Views of Mt. Fuji
52 Döstädning: Beginner’s Translation
53 I Like How They Gather
54 My Mother’s Shoes
55 Blooms Gripped in a Fist
56 Elegy to Be Breathed at the Grand River
58 36 Myopia Road
60 In Which I Consider Intimacy While Making Paella
61 Aphrodisiacal
62 Home Astronomy
63 When the Goldfinches Return to the Purple Coneflower, He Calls to Me
64 Acknowledgments
65 About the Author
Об авторе
Patricia Clark is the author of six volumes of poetry, including Sunday Rising, The Canopy, and most recently Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and Slate, among others. Awards include a Creative Artist Grant in Michigan, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize, and co-winner of the Lucille Medwick Prize from the Poetry Society of America. She also received the 2018 Book of the Year Award from the Poetry Society of Virginia for The Canopy. Patricia was professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University, where she was the university’s poet-in-residence. She was also poet laureate of the city of Grand Rapids from 2005-2007. Her poem “Astronomy ‘In Perfect Silence’” was chosen to go to the moon on the NASA/Space X launch in November 2024 as part of the Lunar Codex.