Evening Train

In Evening Train we witness people on a bus, a window in the night, greenery, a bird on its perch—and then at the center of this world, something nameless seems to open. It’s hard to say just what happens, other than the words of each poem itself. But that isn’t quite right. It’s as if the words are a way for the poet to inscribe silence. You turn the page, wondering, and it arrives again—something quite beyond what is told. Tom Clark is a master. —Aram Saroyan A long time fan of Tom Clark’s poetry, I have turned to his books and blog for years to find inspiration, entertainment, and truth. His is a poetry that I can trust—at once spare and direct, witty and uncompromising, personal and universal, intelligent and deeply felt. I rely on Clark to reveal the nation I live in but often fail to see, complete with its environmental degradation, commercial excess, and kitschy spiritualism. His poems live at the intersection of truth and beauty, weaving the threads of the humdrum and the unbearable with the mystical—or at least with a longing for the mystical. Tom Clark is undoubtedly one of the great living American poets. — Nin Andrews Tom Clark is a master of surprise. He is a poet twenty-four hours a day and in possession of a very entertaining mind. He gets the familiar and the strange to dance together, and the dance steps are never the ones you expect. There is pathos in the humor of the "First it's stuffed bunnies they're giving you. Next it's ice cream and then the nice surprise — you're at the hospital, having an operation." Clark has the ability to guide words as they "turn a nowhere into a putative somewhere" — to take the complications of mental or physical experience and redeem them in lyric poems of notable brevity. Evening Train is smart and companionable and joyously imaginative. — David Lehman These poems are radically, almost luridly, American, mapping out landscapes imagined, described, and entered into with stunning visual acuity and incisive intelligence. Yet the language has a spareness, a near egoless authority, giving this book wondrous aesthetic tension. Evening Train confirms what readers of this major American poet have long Tom Clark is a contemporary master. —Terence Winch