The New World

Poetry. In this book of new poems, we find veteran master Tom Clark at the top of his form. In a new twist on lyric possibility, Clark trains his limpid style and eye on current street life in Berkeley, California. Clark's observational skill is informed by acute social critique and most significantly a heightened sense of time's rapid passage. There is personal history here, too, in poems to Philip Whalen and Robert Duncan. Youth, seen in retrospect, works up to present tense; ultimate doubts as it ends, or seems to. "Time's arrow, Orfeo, never turns around, / So don't look back..."