Newly not eternal / George David Clark.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Clark, George David, author.

Language:

English

Genre:

poetry.

Poetry

Poetry.

Physical Description:

x, 85 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2024]

Summary:

"The poems in George David Clark's Newly Not Eternal imagine God as both an inhuman wall beyond time and mortality and as the little, fist-sized punctures that disturb that façade. Whether searching for transcendence or probing the supernatural, these poems equally fear and challenge divinity. In the background of the book-and foregrounded in a crown of sonnets titled "Ultrasound"-is the absence left by the author's son, Henry, who died in childbirth in 2014. Henry's identical twin brother, Peter, survived, and one of the book's themes is the distorted reflection of eternal things inside those that age and eventually end. Much of the collection is set not in the "real" world, but some place slightly askew from reality. In addition to various versions of the author himself, the speakers of these poems include an imaginary friend, a guardian angel, a genie, and the architect of a black igloo. The book's longest poem imagines a city in which every adult is honored with a statue made in their likeness and placed in the public gardens. Such a setting allows Clark to meditate on the degree to which a person can be captured in a static image, how we both resist and embrace being fixed in place. Most of the collection is rhymed and metered, but Clark's poems wear their forms lightly, often fracturing pentameter units across two or three short lines to soften the effect of regular end rhyme and elevate internal echoes. Ultimately, Newly Not Eternal is obsessed with escaping time, if only briefly in the imagination or in some enduring echo that haunts the mortal ear"-- Provided by publisher.

ISBN:

9780807181270

0807181277

OCLC:

1388209956