Empire of Skin

by Tom Clark

From the moment survivors of Captain Cook's third voyage of discovery found that sea otter skins procured from Northwest Coast Indians would bring $100 apiece on the Chinese market, the future of the coast, the Indians, and the sea otters was irrevocably altered. Tom Clark's serial poetic history of the maritime fur trade documents and elaborates that change, linking white world fur traders with indigenes in extended metaphors of contact and confrontation. Distilling fact from decisive instance to yield an elegiac narrative of the original encounter, the poems develop implications that bring the story into current perspectives―engaging ethnology, ecology, geography, native cultural and mythic history versus the white European world.

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

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.