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Thomas A. Clark is amongst the most
minimalist of contemporary British poets. His writing remains obsessively attentive to form, for he
likes nothing better than reducing his text down to its absolute essence: a
fragment-like miniature of a few concise lines placed with care and precision
within the quiet of the page. Presented this way, his new book The Hundred
Thousand Places is a single poem that engages
with the solitary experience of walking the island and highland landscapes of
Scotland, notably the vicinity surrounding Fife on the east coast where the
writer lives.
Moving from dawn to dusk through 'a dark country / of heather and moor grass
/ of deer grass and moss' there is a gentle unfolding of time and distance in
Clark's intensely focused meditations. Walking through the landscape is
essential to this process and the poet seems perfectly at ease with both the
remoteness of the locality and the ambition of his long, solitary journey on
foot:
eight hundred
acres of heather
for the step
and the stride
on bright days
the world is brittle
the solid rock
is insubstantial
as you tread the deep
accumulations
a snipe cuts
a
curve in space
In this minimalist approach thoughts operate as sensations and yet resonate
objectively, like stark observational snapshots of the natural world, as in
slopes of sunlight
slopes
of snow
sit together
above the scree
innocent
of incident
However there is still a bleakness in the writing whereby cliffs fall away in
the sea mist 'from the edge of a world / only half accomplished' and Clark
clearly has an aptitude like Samuel Beckett to minimally articulate the void
in the rapt instant of displacement when
on the mountain's shoulder
sit on a rocking boulder
rocking and hugging yourself
which could either be a moment of existential crisis or, on a more prosaic
note, a simple inability to deal with the cold ... or perhaps both.
It comes as no surprise that as a visual artist, Clark has for many years
been involved with minimal and conceptual art, having made site-specific
works in several gallery and garden spaces as well as in the landscape
itself. Clark's poems are at times reminiscent of the work of the artist
Richard Long, another figure who emerged from the land art movement, who
reduces his walks to just a few sparse lines of commentary superimposed on a
photograph of the terrain that has just been crossed: 'sleeping on the
footpath / the mountainside in torrents / summer shrine in cloud / muddy
cracks across snowfields', and so on. Like Long, Clark prefers brevity to
describe the surprising strangeness of the walked world:
strong hill shapes
presiding over
pastoral slopes
sheep grazing
salmon in pools
of clear water
runnels of water
freshets of water
many
voices
grey lichens
resting on branches
as if they had dropped
from
the air
There is a desire shared with Long too in wanting to use and explore the land
freely, in opposition to the capitalist fixation to own it and fence it, so
that walking becomes a truly democratic way of measuring, interpreting and
experiencing the landscape.
The similarities, however, don't stop even there. In his visual work, Long
remains the anonymous traveller and maker of tracks, for in the multitude of
photographs documenting his walking expeditions and arrangements of stones,
the artist himself is always missing from the scene. Likewise, Clark's
writing benefits from the poet's absence as if the invisible walker does not
allow the observing 'I' into either the landscape or the frame of the poem:
as
far as you can go
over the machair
there is only surface
it is a plane
of appearance
where nothing
is deferred
lacking depth
you walk on the richly
embroidered
ground
Without relying on first-person interjection to carry the narrative, the self
and the landscape are able to co-exist throughout the poem, almost diffusing
into one another at some points on the journey:
what
you feel
you can contain
what you see
you will become
So admirably high are his ambitions that, in The Hundred Thousand Places, Clark has attempted one of the toughest tasks in poetry: the contemporary nature poem. This
back-to-the-woods sentiment has tantalised and dogged successive generations
of British poets in the two hundred or so years since the age of the
Romantics. Clark tries hard to avoid the more head-in-the-clouds mode of
pastoral verse, but just occasionally he can't resist associating himself
with what has become Wordsworth's Lake-side tradition:
it has
taken half a lifetime
to learn to sit in the sun
among primroses and violets
beside a dried adder skin
your
back to a broken wall
As a safeguard against the enormous risk in this kind of poetry, that of
being reduced to offering only cliche, Clark manages to legitimise his wonder
at the natural world with a more philosophical take where,
you will need to know
who you are, to walk
by the solemn lochs
In The Hundred Thousand Places Clark
orchestrates a concise musical language within exquisite minimal form but
like all astute and attentive nature writers, he makes us feel better
informed about both the vulnerability and power of the planet while
emphasising that as humans, we will follow only a tiny and momentary path on
its surface.
© Peter Gillies 2010
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