Stranger: Poems by Adam Clay (Milkweed 2016)
This is not a collection of poems that I lapped up with extreme pleasure; however, it’s one that I felt mentally challenged by, in a positive way. Clay is a poet that examines everyday life. He picks objects, looks at them, but more so, he looks around them. Clay delves into all the possible corners around “the thing” for thought, for meaning, for a pathway to the next mundane moment of life. There is an apt press quote on the back cover from Cate Marvin that says “refusing to placate or console his reader, Clay proves himself one of our most challenging and brilliant poets.” Clay challenges us, he might not play nice, but he does make our synapses fire a little brighter.
The poem “Even a Straight Line Must Curve to Shape the World” further explains Clay’s approach to poetry, especially in this excerpt:
[…] My mind
in these moments wants
to string a thread from here
to there in such a way that you
would think it had always
been there.[…]
No matter how hard I try,
I find myself returning back
to a logical way of organizing
everything, and I wonder
if I could recognize
madness in its current
river of form? A day on loan
can still be a type of day, the way
the light declines moment by moment,
and we witness the sky moving
away from the earth, a wreath of light
like a vision, like a weariness so divine.
As the reader, I found myself wanting to string threads between lines and poems to understand exactly what Clay was trying to say. Of the objects he chooses to focus on: a couch, damaged plaster, ink spot on a wall. But, that got tiresome, and so I took Clay’s advice and let the threads go to let his pondering wash over me.
Clay creates space with his poems. He clears the way, widening the horizon. He doesn’t necessarily define the horizon; he thinks on it. Space to think. He does this not only with his examination of the minutiae of daily life, but also with his prose. His voice is matter of fact, logical, easy to read even if it isn’t easy to follow his theoretical tangents. His word choice doesn’t often veer into the lyrical side of poetry; rather it stays mostly based in plain language. But there are moments, like at the end of the poem above, that startle you with their airy beauty.
He also creates space within the content of the poems. Many lines reference an absence, a carving, whether it be space in the earth, or metaphorical space in relationships. These are neat carvings of space, that match his tidy use of couplets especially, and other concise, clean formal patterns. He may paint an abstract image for us, but he ties us to some notion of logic with his constrained lines. The lengths of the poems vary; some are short and taut, while other stretch on for pages, looping back on themes and questions.
At the root of these poems there is an unsettled loneliness, an unquenchable desire for thought, and a constant battle with boredom. One of my favorites from the collection, “Sounds of an Emptying House”, shows Clay at his finest. It’s one of the long poems that loops back on themes. The themes present here echo those that are present throughout the entire collection: the passing of time, shifting of relationships, forgiveness, memory, and the emptying of physical space (in this case, it’s tied to an act of closure).
After finishing this collection, I felt I knew more about our speaker when we started, although I couldn’t place a finger on the precise moment of understanding. It’s like Clay says in the poem,”Start This Record Over”:
I’d like to make a map not of the land
but of the path I took to arrive in this place,a map with no idealized purpose,
a map of a thousand airless pines.
We are left with a map of our speaker’s brain, relationships, physical space, and everyday life. And while we may not have specific locations to point at and say, “There, now I understand,” we have still put in the miles with his thoughts and feel somehow connected through a destination-less map.
What other poets defy meaning with their work, and instead, create space for thought?
