New Found Land

These forty-some poems reflect a currently popular theme: resilience. Through learned self-acceptance we eventually find true north. Wanderings, with and without family, lead to discovering that each one of us is uniquely inherited by Earth, despite all vagaries and changing coastlines. And in these poems our neighbor, the bright "green star" Venus, is never far away.Carolyn Clark's poems - a mesh of narratives, word play, scholarly lore, and reflections on our shared human states of growth, marriage, parenthood, daughterhood - should be savored slowly most of all for the lushness of her language… In this collection Plato dwells easily with concepts of Christian Grace; science plays with mysticism; an homage to the almost orgiastic experience of peeling and eating an orange somehow merges into the fruits in "Two Gorges." Clark's horse poems (several lovely ones) remind us of Maxine Kumin's but are their own revelations of muscle and mind. There is much to interest and admire in these poems, but these lines - with a whiff of Kay Ryan and Emily Dickinson-particularly made this reader smile: "But beware: memory is/ a powerful sloth/ hanging nose down/ from a semiotic clothesline." -Eleanor Elson Heginbotham, Professor Emerita, Concordia University St. Paul New Found Land teems with the tentative, shimmering beauty of peace, love, and altered consciousness, courtesy the English language. Clark pays careful attention to the world - and what it buys her is love, which she will share with you. This book is "be here now" reclaimed from what has so wrongly been termed a dead language. A remedy for those who have forgotten the names of the divine, almost 7,000 of them are here: sled ride, wet dog, carrot nose, wind, gusts, spike, rice pot, kudzu, transmission...Venite! Legite! -Judith Swann, poet-writer-editorCarolyn Clark writes from the heart about ordinary life, bringing extraordinary clarity to her physical, emotional and psychological journeying. Her poems are fine companions for any reader's own life travels. -Peter Fortunato, author of Entering the Mountain