~LAURIE MCDIARMID~
PATRICIA
CLARK: MY FATHER ON A BICYCLE
The poet in My
Father on a Bicycle
is a quiet witness
of nature’s stunning
violence, and we are reminded,
poem to poem, of our
inclusion in that nature.
Like Frost, whom Clark
evokes in an epigraph,
the poet’s eye records the
stark beauty in death
and so participates in it.
Patricia Clark’s second volume of poetry,
My Father on a Bicycle,
has the same quiet intensity as her first; her elegies address her
parents, living and dead, innocence, mortality, and work toward
uncovering a spiritual connection with the other, a grace to transcend
the ordinary violence of living. At the very least, grace is what the
poet would like to bring back from this journey, the artist stepping
past the viewer or reader “into the relentless dark,” the underworld,
in order to bring back some vestige of what has been lost — the spirit,
the other, the self.
Many of the poems celebrate the incomplete and
somewhat incoherent nature of this salvage job. Photographs, paintings,
statues, postcards, gardens, neighborhoods, mountains, streams only
partially document the journey and its losses: “Was it a kind of love
to have saved / this stuff?” the poet wonders. “Or was it a reflex,
blind, / instinctual, to hoard what’s been dear…” Clark’s voice
captures the child’s intensity of first encounters and combines it with
an adult’s survivor guilt. “Like a refugee in a wartorn country,” she
writes, “I escaped” from that place — whether the dark country of
childhood, of social erasure, of need and desire thwarted, of death —
“without a glance back, taking only what I could grip in my hands, or
remember.” And now her job seems to be to rediscover that place in the
ordinary landscape of the backyard, the urban lake, the settled terrain
of the Midwest.
The volume’s title poem is a tender address to the
lost father, his stork-like legs signifying a goofy abandon to
experience in the driveway, his odd balance in the world encapsulated
in the image of him fishing a stream, the “[d]eep, moving water his
abiding friend.” In many of Clark’s poems, nature is a source of both
nostalgia and bittersweet recognition of mortality, and birds,
such as the robin Clark views as the shadow of a
declining mother, are the “American Elegists” with which the poet
identifies. These birds voice the ambivalent truth about our journey
between life and death, and their song, a warbling “on the margins,
slim, // of either waking or drifting off,” like Clark’s work, blends
dream, sorrow, change, and delicate flowering. The song illustrates, in
fragile but clear images, the “slow decline // any heart will go
through, any forest or field, / the woman who has lifted many children
up / now taken to rest, or nearly.”
The poet in My
Father on a Bicycle is a quiet witness of nature’s stunning
violence, and we are reminded, poem to poem, of our inclusion in that
nature. Like Frost, whom Clark evokes in an epigraph, the poet’s eye
records the stark beauty in death and so participates in it. She
would like “[t]o live the death” of the toad, for example, “the thrash
/ in red” as the snake snaps it up. Clark reminds us of redemption’s
bloody cost; she wants to “hunker down and yet be lifted up,” perhaps
by the poignant details, the vivid smells, sounds, flavors, caresses of
nature. Nature, in these poems, has no heart, no feeling. The
poet’s job is to provide that heart. In “Flies,” Clark reminds us that
“the photo only breaks your heart / when more details are known,” and
it seems, particularly in this volume, that heart's created through
breaking.
Though Clark turns an unflinching eye toward the
brutal excesses of nature’s unfeeling rituals — and includes, at times,
her parents, those she loves or has loved, and herself, in this
unflinching examination — by the end of the volume even human actors
who have caused pain are redeemed with gentle, natural images. The
father who made a young girl’s rabbits scream lies in the middle of the
road in another poem, a field mouse hiding in his pocket. “Two gentle
natures, / the mouses’s and his” in a startlingly vulnerable symbiosis
— this is how the poet chooses to remember her father.
At times, the poems may seem too precious to bear
the weight of witness, as in “days like flowers // or water, what you
can’t hold before / it’s gone.” But this fragility is an illusion, like
the unnamed flowers at the side of an “idle” summer road that the poet
casually names. Underneath the flowers and the meditative poems is the
steely sentence that, painful as it is, needed to be said, arranged now
in a bouquet.
Finally, Clark’s poems remind us of nature’s
endurance, of the brutal promise implied in each dying flower, each
murdered toad. “I believe in perennials,” the poet announces. My Father on a Bicycle makes me
believe in them, too.
Clark, Patricia. My
Father on a Bicycle. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State
University Press,
2005. ISBN: 0-87013-741-7 $19.95
© by Laurie McDiarmid
