Poet laureate Clark releases new book

A sniff of iron-cold, the taste of wet damp, and a half-tree, half-woman wearing a dress "knitted together from the delta shapes / of cottonwood leaves" are just a few of the sensory images conjured up by the poetry of Patricia Clark in her new book, My Father on a Bicycle. The award-winning poet-in-residence and professor of writing at Grand Valley was named in March as the next poet laureate for the city of Grand Rapids. She is the second person appointed the two-year position.

Clark was also the recipient of a Creative Artist Grant from ArtServe Michigan for 2003. This new book includes some of her work from the grant, with poems focusing on the Grand River, especially Riverside Park, as a meditative landscape discovering how "wisdom is moving water."

Other poems make a spiritual journey from the Pacific Northwest forests of her childhood. They explore the themes of love, mortality, and loss in the setting of the natural world, as in "the deserted road/impossible to find now, overgrown and gone." In the outdoors, near rivers and on walks, the speaker in these lyrical poems meditates on subjects she observes, celebrates life, and explores memory.

Clark describes her poetry by quoting a line from the English poet William Blake, "Dip him in the river who loves water." "I see my poetry as dipping the reader into a river, into an ebb and flow of imagery, thought, and feeling, says Clark. "I see my poems as meditations, as journeys to a place where a 'momentary stay against confusion' (to quote Robert Frost) can be found."

Clark won the first book award from Women in Literature for her previous book of poetry, North of Wondering. She is also the co-editor of Worlds in Our Words: An Anthology of Contemporary American Women Writers. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Slate, Strand, New England Review, North American Review, Pennsylvania Review, Black Warrior Review, and Seattle Review.

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