Newly Not Eternal
Forthcoming January 2024 from Louisiana State University Press
Equal parts elegy and ode, Newly Not Eternal explores the awesome suffering and sentiment implicit in human mortality. At the heart of this collection, a son has died on the cusp of his first breath, but the book’s stakes are larger and more universal than a single, silent, foreshortened life. Ranging from personal lyrics to monologues in persona, from triolets to a modified crown of sonnets, from surreal fantasy to natural landscape, these poems sing of the brutality of time and the beauty that transcends it.
Early praise for Newly Not Eternal:
George David Clark’s new book of poems is as much a musical event as it is a literary one. This poet truly listens to every word he sets to paper—good luck resisting the urge to give voice to these poems as you read them! Yet he also “exhumes / this catch of bruises,” with a central sequence exploring parental grief—sound and ultrasound sounding the depths of love, faith, and mourning. This treasure of a book, to borrow one of Clark’s many memorable phrases, is “a fine, bright prayer / that never hits the ground —Amit Majmudar, author of What He Did in Solitary
George David Clark’s poems are precise and memorable—songs in which deep feeling provokes startlingly fresh language. They are passionate poems, and the music that they make is true to the experience, reliably so, and amply. Like Larkin’s country church, Clark’s poems preside over “marriage and birth, / And death, and thoughts of these.” His elegiac lyrics at once mourn our losses, even as they affirm this fallen life. Newly Not Eternal is brilliantly alive from cover to cover. —David Yezzi, author of More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems
George David Clark’s beautiful and moving second collection of poems, Newly Not Eternal, is a wonderful showcase for his formidable formal talents—the ear is constantly surprised by the felicity of the recurring music he clearly delights in playing with. The centerpiece of the book, a crown of sonnets in which he meditates on the loss of a stillborn child, is an incredibly affecting tour de force that subtly informs the rest of the poems in the book with its spiritual and religious questioning. He nimbly invents his own forms—“Sun on Your Shoulders” is a perfect little gem of an example among quite a few others, and the crown of sonnets at the center is not the traditional form, but one he alters to suit his own poetic aims. The subtle display of formal variations here enhances his deeply contemplative project—that of interrogating faith with a poet’s ear and eye and a generous, open heart. —Sidney Wade, author of Deep Gossip: New and Selected Poems
Order Newly Not Eternal from LSU Press • Order Newly Not Eternal from Amazon • Order Newly Not Eternal (signed) from this Site
Selected Poems from Newly Not Eternal Available Online: “Ultrasound: Your Picture” at the Academy of American Poets, originally in The Hopkins Review “Song of the Genie” at Literary Matters “Sun on Your Shoulders” at Rattle “Kaleidoscope” at The Cortland Review “Washing Your Feet” at Verse Daily, originally in Ecotone “Loud Outs” at the Academy of American Poets, originally in The Southern Review