Customer Reviews

In the Evening of No Warning (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

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It would be hard to find a recent book of poetry in which language serves subject as
brilliantly as in Kevin Clark's In the Evening of No Warning. These hard-won poems go deep
and range far. What first dazzles by sheer inventiveness and originality soon captivates a reader
by force of the thought the language is called upon to bear. Terms of daily life- the passage of
time, parenthood, travel, sexuality- dramatically frame the narratives. The wit and daring of
"One of Us," the poignancy of the title poem and of "Margaret's Face," the scope of "Eros in
Middle Age," "The Price," "The End," have an intensity that compels a reader's impassioned
engagement. This book's publication is cause for rejoicing.

You can hear him read a few poem on [...] Listen and buy this book.

These poems about time, circularity, generation, and parallel worlds are always, each of themselves, circular and complete. Of his dead father he says, "in one year I will be his senior" What one reader here called "self absorbed" I call genuineness because all of the personal only serves to make the universal revelations of his poems honest and tenable. He's unassumingly profound. Which of course makes us all think we can be poets.

As the book title suggests, In the Evening of No Warning, there is no such thing as security in a world that is often absurd and unpredictable. We believe that we can protect ourselves from "the problematic and the painful" by building up our little comfort zones with power, fame or riches, with lies and deceptions, but such props are merely deviations from reality. The "familiar" can slip at any time. There are no warnings. If there is to be a sanctuary or salvation at all-it exists when we least expect it-when we're struck by a luminous moment, an epiphany, that transforms us, if only temporarily. On turning to his wife and son, at the end of "The Steeple," Clark finds that inner sanctuary:

...Believing absolutely
in my love for both of them only, I'll listen
quietly in my chair, her lyric, unchanted words
breaking like revelations across his face.

"Many of these poems," wrote Norman Dubie, "are altogether sweet and perfect. This is a wonderful book."

I highly recommend this book! Buy it!

Haunting, lyrical, bittersweet, at times mesmerizing, Kevin Clark's first collection of poems causes us to know how long we have waited for it, and to know that it won't be soon enough before we can have his second. The poems in IN THE EVENING OF NO WARNING are filled with wise sorrow and humor about relationships, families, memory, about love and loss. There is not a trivial moment here; like twilight, the book lingers with us long after we have shut the doors of its covers and come back to the lights of our own lives, which Clark, in musical yet colloquial and precise language, so tenderly illuminates.