Sleepwalker's Fate: New and Selected Poems 1965-1991

by Tom Clark

Selected work from Tom Clark’s first quarter century of writing, from songs of innocence published when he was twenty-five (”Lake Life, I want to take a bath/ In you and forget death”) to lines reflecting the disappointments and compromises of middle age (”While everything external/ dies away in the far off/ echo of the soul/ still there's a mill wheel turning/ . . . / by some distant stream/ a note of peace/ in a life which/ will never be peaceful”).
The book is divided into two the generous ”New Poems, 1986–1991,” which collects recent lyrics mourning the passing of time, the trials of insomnia, the sad politics of poetry, and the sadder poetry of politics; and ”Dark Continent, 1965–1986,” Clark's judicious winnowing of his earlier work (on love, baseball, classicism, jazz, physics, trout kills, popular culture, and Catholic-Zen-antinomian mysticism). Between the two comes a ferocious prose poem, ”Diary of Desert War, 1990–1991,” written in the terse, telegraphic style of the Times Square news zipper––that is, of a news zipper in the hands of a surrealist op-ed poet.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published March 1, 1992

About the author

Clark was an American poet, editor and biographer. Clark was educated at the University of Michigan and served as poetry editor of "The Paris Review" from 1963 to 1973 and published numerous volumes of poetry with Black Sparrow Press. His literary essays and reviews have appeared in "The New York Times," "Times Literary Supplement," and many other journals.