Sunday Rising

by Patricia Clark

Wallace Stevens, in his poem “A Postcard from the Volcano,” writes, “left what we felt / at what we saw.” Patricia Clark’s stunning fourth poetry collection, Sunday Rising, is full of such moments, carefully wrought and mined for their resonance. Haunting human forms rise from the underworld, seeking to communicate, longing for connection. In language as resounding and evocative as the subjects it describes, Sunday Rising questions the past, human relationships, the meaning of loss, and the author’s own heritage. With landscapes as familiar as Michigan and as distant as the shores of Western Europe, these poems bring to light the cracks and fissures in our world, amid lyric exhalations rising like clouds above the birds, trees, and coastlines, language capturing the poet’s spiritual longing as well as moments of passion and sorrow. From the first poem to the last, an intimate relationship with the physical world emerges. Its teachings, consolations, utterances, and echoes comprise a sense of discovery. The ethereal and often spiritual practice of seeing and taking note is celebrated, whether this process yields gemstones or ore, or words wrought into the music and imagery of poetry.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 2013

About the author

Patricia Clark is the author of Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars, her sixth book of poems, and three chapbooks. She has work just out (or forthcoming) in Plume, The Southern Review, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Pedestal, Quartet, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. Her poem “Astronomy: ‘In Perfect Silence’” was chosen to go to the moon as part of the Lunar Codex on a NASA Space X flight in fall 2024. Her seventh book of poems, O Lucky Day, is forthcoming in January ’25 from Madville Publishing.

Reviews

[Vincent Hiscock]

great! my favorite poem of the collection starts as an ecphrasis of Andō Hiroshige's "Full Moon at Seba" & slips seamlessly into the space of the poet, where the work becomes active for her ... until the two places on opposite sides of a spinning globe collapse, startlingly & movingly, together in that bridge of communication between two moments that art uniquely makes possible:

Good to focus on the task
at hand, afloat on river water--
if you look up at sky, the star field
as I did one recent morning--
in mid-footfall on blacktop
down a darkened street with the dog,
counting by tens up to one hundred,
two hundred before
slowing, letting breath huff out--.

If one pauses to look, staring,
the brittle icy stars can
shock you--what else besides
the heavens neglected
by me for months?
Now a slap of recognition,
this sliding back into my skin--
diamond-white stars, black sky,
the hunter's figure showing clearly.

I embraced every contradiction of newfound
sight, the vast distance from the River Serba
to this place, the utter loveliness of being
a speck on a watery planet wobbling through space.
The two men go on bending to their task,
I step outside in dark with the dog--
and wood heaped on that distant shore
crackles a fragrant fire, red-gold flame
gleaming by wet rocks, one where I warm my hands.




The whole collection warrants and rewards a close read! :-)

[Roya Sabri]

“A soul tears itself from the body and soars” opens Patricia Clark’s fourth collection of poetry, Sunday Rising. The epigraph, from Czeslaw Milosz’s “Second Space,” promises heaven, but it is not this ethereal flight to which Clark dedicates her words. It is the tearing that captivates her most. “Risen from the Underworld,” the ekphrastic poem that follows the epigraph, gives wing to three hollow sculptures that take the forms of poetic muses. But while the sculptures rise like smoke, they enter the poem “Arranged on slabs of sedimentary rock, rough-edged…” Despite a continual reaching for the eternal, Clark’s poems remain planted in the gritty solid world around her. Like a tide pool on a stormy day, Clark’s collection mesmerizes with its ebb and flow to and from the shores of the earth. It because her poems crash fully onto the body of this world — “cicadas, grackles, / flies” and all — that she is able to carry the reader out beyond death in the ebb.

[Hikari Miya]

Patricia Clark includes a very colorful collection of poems, which include narrative poems, lyrical poems, ekphrastic poems, elegies, a sestina, a villanelle, and more in Sunday Rising. Her poems invoke feelings of the loss and loneliness that can be felt in the presence of nature, but she also includes warmer, sunnier tones as well. Perhaps her most interesting poem is "Risen from the Underworld", an abecedarian poem that she opens her book with. My favorite line comes from my favorite poem in her book, "Across Barbed Wire": "It's mostly ridiculous how much we care, both silly and not silly that it matters to us".

[Andy Kim]

With her own touch of subtlety and grace, Patricia Clark has collected quite the thought-provoking and moving work. Sunday Rising is a personal collection of poems, yet it's written in such a way, distilled and refined, that it leaves bare an essence, all too relatable.

[Superstition Review]

Clark’s Sunday Rising is a thoughtful meditation on the self, investigated through the realm of nature. Seasons and landscapes convey themes of familial connections and death. Autumnal imagery parallels inner-transformation; Clark maintains that there’s much to be gained from renewal: “Let’s call it rebirth: watching time...The old self dying away...a skeletal crack, then snap, as a ridgeline breaks all down the thorax, the bony carapace splitting.”

Winter, in turn, hints at heavier topics of loss and abandonment, “weight snapping something hidden underfoot.” Yet Clark reflects on the aftermath of tragedy, as ashes to flames: “How many visions of a thing burned clean, the mass destroyed, what’s left made beautiful by riddance, a scouring flame?”

Throughout the collection, Clark invokes themes through formatting and language reminiscent of a river. Its lyricism develops as “a creation of pure adagio,” slowly paced but worth the wait at the end of its stream-of-consciousness mode of observation. “Think learning a new palette of riverine words,” Clark writes. It mirrors Clark’s experimentation with form, simultaneously winding down the page as the reader discovers, to their pleasant surprise, that the sound is just as fluid.

Ultimately, the trials of existence that Clark explores through her poems culminate into a triumph of the self. Clark best expresses this sentiment in “Exile Song,” the concluding piece of the collection, where she writes: “When the view of the bay was blocked, I climbed to the rooftops.” The enlightened state achieved by the end of the journey comes from fully realizing and accepting the necessity of tragedy and the space it provides for reflection and analysis. If you enjoy reading that inspires contemplation, transcribed in thoroughly beautiful instances of naturalistic imagery and metaphor, then this is the book for you.

by Carly Corderman

[Patti]

The cover of this book of poetry fits the writing well. The poems are a montage of feelings and interactions with nature and loved ones - both totally connected and at one with the subject and often torn apart and the oh so sad and longing for the connection to be remade.

The bond I have with my sister felt even more precious as I felt the longing Patricia Clark describes again and again for re-forging the ties with her estranged sister.

from MISSING
....Sister, will I go through another season without you?
Years ago a girl fell on a cement step.

gripping a glass jar swimming with tadpoles.
They became frogs in the nearby pond,

later stunted with ulcers, extra genitals and limbs.
I hear a fatal ticking and call, again, your name.


And about a lover from ROCKS AND MINERALS
I stood as sure of him
as stone, as gravity, as
white oak tree trunk eighty feet
up in the yard, SOLID,
I called him when others
named him air, cloud, pine
needle cluster fragile, wisp
of seed blown from a milkweed,
flower of chocolate joe-pye
weed, dandelion. Should
never have slept sure of him
as sun touching forearm skin
after winter's length, as pillow
for my sore head. Others
warned but I thought no,
not him, not me, this
substance is feldspar,
epidote, limestone,
even better-dolomite.....

These poems pull the reader in. You are there witnessing the scene, feeling the beauty and the pain. These are poems to read slowly and to savor.

[Meghan]

Patricia Clark’s poetry collection, Sunday Rising, studies the relationship between the natural world and its human inhabitants with a compassionate yet measured eye. Following the style of ecopoetics, Clark delves into the relationship between nature and human perception—specifically the perception of the poet. Clark’s speaker moves comfortably in both the interpersonal world and among the birds that so often appear in her poems. In her “Winter Nests,” Clark’s speaker shifts from an earthbound view to a bird’s eye one, an apt metaphor for the fluidity of voice that Clark demonstrates throughout the book. Never trapped within one perspective, Clark imagines the world through different lenses. For example, although she reveres natures, Clark does not imagine nature as perfect. Like Whitman’s “This Compost," the nature poems of Sunday Rising develop a loving, but nuanced image of nature. “Winter Nests” exemplifies this nuance, as Clark appreciates the ability of the birds to develop such sturdy nests that protect from the cruel cold of nature. Clark describes the location of the nests, “in a blasted / bare oak for a storm shield, a blizzard house when / it’s this artic, frigid – half dead landscape seared below.”

[Helen]

Patricia Clark’s fourth volume of poems is a wise and engaging collection that derives inspiration from nature and other works of art. The opening, ekphrastic poem, “Risen from the Underworld” is based on Jaume Plensa’s sculpture “I, You, She, or He,” an installation of three figures whose hollow shells are made of stainless steel letters. The figures are positioned to face each other, as if in conversation. The poet imagines them “risen up, like smoke,” with air “whiffing” through their empty bodies. She is interested not in their rigid, steel framework, but rather, in the spaces within them through which the elements of the world pass. “Risen from the Underworld” initiates a motif of space, one which Clark steadily deepens and explores throughout her collection by conflating it with the concept of loss. This is a trope that the poet handles beautifully!

Every poem is worth a read. And the cover art is to die for!

[Patricia Murphy]

I especially appreciate the pulsing back to: water, sister, trees, sea. Some of my favorite moments:

"In a month the trees will be masts
bare as the boats."

"maybe my ears are made
mostly for reasons of symmetry."

"An acorn with its cap beside it like a cup."

[Helen]

Poems about family, grief, nature. The feeling of being transplanted from one place to another, the jarring feelings and also the pleasures of someplace new. Burial Underwear will sit with me for a long time, my favorite poem in the collection.