Thomas a Clark – författare

Shortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year AwardIn Farm by the Shore, Thomas A Clark continues his investigations into the landscape and culture of the Scottish highlands and islands. His brief notations and fragments embody the precarious balance between sea and land, wilderness and civilisation, while everything is played out in a context of weather. The spaces between the poems, which both link and divide them, are shades of quiet, indications of time or distance, or graphs of the vagaries of attention. In such a climate, to farm, or walk, or write, is to persist. You come to one thing and then another.

Shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2021Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020This Selected Poems celebrates Scotland's most distinctive contemporary writer - a vivid minimalist, ruralist and experimentalist.

that which appears gathers together four book-length sequences; The Hundred Thousand Places, Yellow & Blue and Farm by the Shore, all previously published by Carcanet, plus the title book, that which appears, published by Paragon Press (1994).The poems gathered in that which appears emerge from a practice of walking in the varied landscapes of the highlands and islands of Scotland. They attempt to attend and respond to the evidence, to 'snow on moss on stone', with 'small continual adjustments'.A conviction grows that environmental damage can only begin to be repaired by many careful and repeated acts of attention. How can we move here with resourcefulness and least intrusion? Can poetry be generous in response while subject to an ethic of care for place and particularity? Can it provide spaces that will allow for, that welcome and celebrate, that which appears?

‘to be affected in many waysis the sole ambition of the days’thrums grows out of Clark’s celebrated collection, that which appears, in an extension and affirmation of that book’s particular aesthetic. Including poems first published in London Review of Books and New York Review of Books, the poems’ closely observed landscapes tell of presence and loss, of change and precarious continuity.One of Scotland’s most distinctive writers, a vivid minimalist, ruralist and experimentalist, his selected poems, The Threadbare Coat (2020), is also published by Carcanet.

To walk through a landscape is to be part of a slow unfolding of time and distance, to commit yourself to an adventure. The Hundred Thousand Places is a single poem that travels across seasons, through a variety of Scottish highland and island landscapes, from dawn to dusk. Make an early start, 'feel your way out / into what might…take form'. It is a long walk, along the coast, over mountain and moorland, through pine and birch forest, ending on a shore where the sea offers 'another knowledge / wild and cold'.Attentive and responsive, the unhurried pace of Thomas A. Clark's writing draws the reader into a shared journey, pausing on the possibilities of a phrase, the music of the names of trees and flowers, or turning the page to open new horizons.Cover painting: One Thousand Blue Places (detail) by Laurie Clark, reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Cover design by StephenRaw.com.