To Make Room for the Sea

by Adam Clay

"That's the magic of this book--the way Adam Clay, line after line, enacts the mind on the page." --MAGGIE SMITH

To Make Room for the Sea reckons with the notion that nothing in this world is permanent. Led by an introspective speaker, these poems examine a landscape that resists full focus, and conclude that "it's easier to love what we don't know."

"I hold this leaf I think / you should see, but I can't quite / say why," Adam Clay writes, as he navigates a variety of both personal and ecological fixations: disembodied bullfrog croaks, the growth of his child, a computer's dreaded blue screen of death. The observations in To Make Room for the Sea convey both grief for the Anthropocene and hope for the future. The poems read like field notes from someone who knows the world and hopes to know it differently.

On the precipice of great change and restructured perspective, Clay's poems linger in "the second between taking in a vision and processing it," in the moment when the world is less a familiar system and more a palette of colors and potential.

To Make Room for the Sea delights as much as it mourns. It looks forward as much as it reflects. Deft and hopeful, the poems in this collection gently encourage us to take another look at a world "only some strange god might have thought up / in a drunken stumble."

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2020

About the author

Adam Clay's most recent book is Circle Back (Milkweed Editions, 2024). His poems have appeared in Tin House, jubilat, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Louisiana State University and edits AUTOCORRECT, a journal of poetry and poetics.

Reviews

[Kylie Wyodie]

You can tell the author intends to situate his personal experience within the broader context of environmental precarity, however that is not how it ultimately comes off. We’re in the midst of a movement of white writers desperately riffling through their lives for any type of trauma to mine, and since most academic poets don’t really have any hardships to speak of, we see a lot of work like Clay’s that reach for lofty meaning amid noble topics like climate change but are really thinly veiled exercises in solipsism. He got divorced and the planet is dying. If that wasn’t a common experience, who would ever listen to The National?

[Allison]

Why do I always read poetry and compare new collections to previous ones? I’m so guilty here. I’m going to sit with this one awhile because I may not have been in the right mindset to accept the meditation that is Adam Clay’s mode. What I love without hesitation are his only child poems and those about his daughter.

[美音]

I liked some! This is my favorite

Before sleep, I hear the wind chimes
from our neighbors front porch
and backyard and from
the other side of their house. The chimes
make some kind of sense of the wind,
though I don't know what sense
it might be. For beauty only?
Or a sieve for the chaos to slip through?

[Katie]

I gave this 4 stars because I recognize the poetic skill in a lot of these poems — however, I couldn’t wait to just be done with it. There were about 4 poems I loved, and a handful of single lines I collected for their beauty. It was a 2.5 star read in my heart, though. Call me lazy, but I just felt no desire to dig into most of these poems. There were times some of them felt needlessly inaccessible and I just moved on without a backwards glance. I think there will be people who want to put that time in and will connect with this book, but I wasn’t one of them.

[Juliano]

“We catch a glimpse / of self within the self.” In Adam Clay’s breathtaking collection To Make Room for the Sea, this observation in the first poem epitomises one of the preoccupations of the book as a whole, while also indicating both the philosophical nature of Clay’s explorations and their luminous, lyrical quality. Here is what it means to experience “the second between taking in a vision and processing it”, as Clay has it in his prose poem ‘Where the Map Is’; these are poems concerned with rendering the self and the world around it, what it means to fail at that vital expression: “It’s evening, and I number how many / unread books remain unwritten, // marvel at what the body will do / to survive.” “It isn’t / a mistake to see wreckage / before it happens. I am / drawing a self-portrait / and trying to remove the self”; “I have a thousand / things to say right before my heart seizes up”. There are so many outstanding and well-titled poems: ‘Meditation for the Silence of Morning’, ‘At the Heart of a Multitude of Things’, ‘Sonnet’, Blue Screen of Death’, ‘Form of Love’, ‘Domestic Barbarians’, ‘Exile’. Between parenthood and the recognition of mortality, between nature and human, Clay exports and excavates these gulfs:“Life mostly feels like walking the line / between an elegy and an ode”; “What’s unknown / in the future feels more sensible than the past”; and “beneath / every elegy lives the promise that a life / will persist long after its song.” Ultimately we are left with certain hard-won truths: “we only / believe the narrative of what the eye can see”, for instance, and also what undeniably “lucky / confluence of objects our bodies are”.

[Angela]

I’m embracing a single ounce of wonder
for the way it sharpens

my heart into a perfect fit,
into a stumbling mess of stars.”

3.5 stars

A very cohesive collection that reflects the peculiarity of being human. To Make Room for the Sea is an ode to the past, the present, and the future. It’s a reflection on language and its ability to preserve, shape and corrupt. How strange and how wonderful it is to exist in a moment and not comprehend exactly how we’ve gotten here.

[Samuel]

I picked this up on a whim because usually I like what Milkweed publishes. There are so many underrated, overlooked poets out there, and while there’s nothing terrible about the book, it’s mediocre poetry that you forget the next day. Clay is very connected in the poetry world, and I suppose that speaks to why some poets keep getting published, though they lack vision and originality.

[Chloe Lawrence]

Though not all reach this level of excellence, some of Clay's poems hit in exactly the right places. The best of his poems are just out of reach of the mind without sacrificing simplicity, and they slip in larger themes and ideas to consider.

[Brandon]

It's a solid collection but there was nothing really commanding or compelling but not it's bad either.

Some I liked:

Mississippi Elegy
In Bed and Where is the Sun?
For Broken Things
In Praise of Unknowing

[pb]

slice of life goodness

[christina ♥]

» QUICK OVERVIEW «
Stars: ★★☆☆☆
Plot: ★★★☆☆
Readability: ★★★☆☆
Characters: ★★★☆☆
Writing: ★★☆☆☆
Recommend: ✗


» PLOT «
To Make Room for the Sea reckons with the notion that nothing in this world is permanent. Led by an introspective speaker, these poems examine a landscape that resists full focus, and conclude that "it's easier to love what we don't know."

*This is a work of nonfiction, so a default rating of 3 stars was given.

» READABILITY «
fast read

» CHARACTERS «
*This is a work of nonfiction, so a default rating of 3 stars was given.

» WRITING «
average , nothing special

» OVERALL «
not bad, but nothing memorable

[Courtney LeBlanc]

Most of these poems felt a little too abstract for me, I had a hard time connecting with them and really knowing what they were about. Some beautiful language but overall, it didn't pull me in.

from How Do You Feel about Ashbery?: "I have a thousand / things to say right before my heart seizes up, // a muscle braided and turned tighter. It's sensible / to perceive the unexpected. Everything's improbable, / after all. In private we find less of an echo and a more / true and real version of the self."

from Just Off a Highway in North Central Missouri: "If right now / I were to break into anything, / it would be those trees lining the field / looking nearly dead, for in their / rickety limbs there lies a promise / too great for even the wrong season / to take away, too great / for even the strongest wind to maim."