Jeanne E. Clark heeds Dickinson's advice to tell all the truth and tell it slant. Rather than settling for the preening gush or anecdotal flatness of much contemporary poetry, her work travels down roads named Bluelick and Slabtown to retrieve a rich sense of place and a sinewy American language. Like the best blues songs, these poems create an oblique music of leaps and gaps; they let reticence reverberate and sing. The world of Ohio Blue Tips is a place of Marlowe beds and Coniber traps, bluegills and yellow rutabaga, pronating arches and charcoal briquets. It is an interior furnished with Moo-Cow Creamers, eyelet tableskirts, and Mae West cats. Clark's implied narratives confront class and aspiration in the unfamed lives of Joe Silver, a retarded prisoner "whose eyes are the blue tips of kitchen matches," and Quinn Margaret who is "Backslidden and given over / To a reprobate mind."
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Jeanne E. Clark heeds Dickinson's advice to tell all the truth and tell it slant. Rather than settling for the preening gush or anecdotal flatness of much contemporary poetry, her work travels down roads named Bluelick and Slabtown to retrieve a rich sense of place and a sinewy American language. Like the best blues songs, these poems create an oblique music of leaps and gaps; they let reticence reverberate and sing. The world of Ohio Blue Tips is a place of Marlowe beds and Coniber traps, bluegills and yellow rutabaga, pronating arches and charcoal briquets. It is an interior furnished with Moo-Cow Creamers, eyelet tableskirts, and Mae West cats. Clark's implied narratives confront class and aspiration in the unfamed lives of Joe Silver, a retarded prisoner "whose eyes are the blue tips of kitchen matches," and Quinn Margaret who is "Backslidden and given over / To a reprobate mind." Though the poems have their own gritty freshness, the sensibility is kin, perhaps, to that of Robert Creeley, Forrest Gander, Lorine Neidecker, William Carlos Williams, and C.D. Wright. In this tradition, Jeanne E. Clark recreates incendiary moments that strike like "wood against wood, Ohio Blue Tips," and transform us forever. She "hears music, / Which is / Its own skin." -- Alice Fulton
About the Author
Jeanne E. Clark was born and raised in Northwest Ohio. She teaches Creative Writing at Arizona State University and for the Arizona Commission on the Arts as an Artist-in-Education. She was the winner of the 1995 Loft Prize in Poetry.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
This a good collection to own,
By Jordan_Hal (California) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Ohio Blue Tips (Akron Series in Poetry) (Hardcover)
This is a good collection to own, along with the works of Alison Townsend and The Photos In The Closet by Daniel E. Lopez.
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