The Path to the Sea

Once I was a deer stepping under trees my form always broken by lights and shadows, then I was a wildcat leaping up and away from the traces of my own rigour and ferocity, in a fold of hills nodding with flowers I took on many shapes and colours, seldom was I present to myself in a form half as alluring as what I might become, again I was a goldcrest a bright fragment of song moving through the forest leading farther in, at times defeated reduced to stone I lay disregarded concealed in the open, then I was a juniper turning to take the slope pausing and bracing myself above a sheer drop, and once I was a dragonfly for an afternoon little more than a notion of the stillness and the green. Thomas A Clark is highly-regarded as a minimalist Romantic poet whose work is consistently attentive to form and to the experience of walking in the landscape. He returns again and again to the lonely terrain of the Highlands and Islands as a starting point, treating the finished book as imaginative space, the page a framing device around an image or a phrase, and the turning of pages a revelation or delay. His poetry is intensely lyrical, with every detail, every observation pared down to its quintessence so that there is not a single wasted word. This long-awaited collection will be welcomed by all those with an interest in the contemporary British pastoral tradition.