At the Fair

Poetry. Not nostalgia transports us here, but the sweet pulse of 'vanished ephemerae, ' love of the Voyage, the illumination, and 'throbbing rituals' of a life lived always inside poetry. Tom Clark's prodigious archive of memory trembles on the edge of a teetering universe, calls us back toward the imagination of Reverdy, Vallejo, Ungaretti as witness to the power and thrust and ethos of language. 'The universe is strange, the universe is dangerous, the universe doesn't answer the phone.' Indeed. But Clark does answer here for all us dreamers--Anne Waldman