Choose Lethe: Remember to Forget by Carolyn Clark
$14.99
With sharp, careful focus, Carolyn Clark guides our gaze over the shoulder of a woman who stands in front of a mirror after a bath; she flicks her hand and “a thousand faces [are] born” from the drops that land on the misty mirror before her. An entire house is “mumbling with flowers,” a twig shakes off its burden of snow, and a girl takes thoughtful care her horse does not feel the cold sting of the bit against its tongue in the winter air. Clark takes ownership of her writing in the second poem, “An Introduction: I am a Writer,” and through her persistent and bold voice we learn to celebrate each drop of water on the mirror, each twig that snaps in attention to a prior state, each oat that makes its successful way into the horse’s soft mouth.
–Abby N. Lewis, author of Reticent
Word Scythe: Wind River
What is this dusty voice
kicked up from fallen leaves?
Fresh September
intrudes on our senses,
sharpens the word scythe
that ever follows fullness.
Corn not yet reaped
stands in dusky rows
rattling dry husks
while in the kitchen
famine-defying Penates,
crickets of all sizes,
sentinel the sink.
Images edge out
and fray,
old cut-offs
fringed in summer’s bleach,
still hot.
Autumnal sun
spicy as paprika
summons her aging children,
seeds that slough off
steep mud banks where
shimmery cottonwoods
yield their shade
to spindly spores,
whose whitened dancers
foil to follow
the river wind round.
Hope is in the healing
Hope is in the healing,
the looking up
when the horse trips
going over the triple spread.
Remember what the Good Book says:
keep your chin up
and be grateful
for the forgiving ground,
the dark tumble of earth
that absorbs
the curl of our spines
as we roll
earthbound
in an indoor ring
where the ground
is not frozen
this winter,
and like memory,
keeps coming back
to me.
Description
Choose Lethe: Remember to Forget
by Carolyn Clark
$14.99, paper
978-1-63534-469-1
2018
Carolyn Clark was born in Ithaca, NY and often lived abroad. She studied Classics at Cornell, Brown and Johns Hopkins (diss. Tibullus Illustrated: Lares, Genius and Sacred Landscapes, Carolyn Clark Breen, UMI Press, 1998) and currently lives and writes in the Finger Lakes region.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.