Hundred Thousand Places

Thomas A Clark lives in a fishing village on the east coast of Scotland. Five books of his poetry have been published by Carcanet, including The Hundred Thousand Places (2009), Yellow & Blue (2014), Farm by the Shore (2017), The Threadbare Coat (2020) and that which appears (2024). Numerous small books, cards and editions from his own Moschatel Press investigate ways that the presentation of poetry can inform sense and nuance. During the summer months, with the artist Laurie Clark, he runs Cairn Gallery, a space for minimal and conceptual art.

'The Hundred Thousand Places stands at a tentative and oblique angle to the more established modes of pastoral writing. There is a beautiful moment in George Oppen's 'Psalm' when he exclaims of some deer, 'That they are there!', and the fact of the natural world's being there at all supersedes the need for description. There is plenty of description in these poems, but they too converge on a place of revelation whose name is simply 'there'.'The Guardian