Stepping Up to the Station

Roger Nash is Academic Vice-President of Athabasca University and author
of Night Flying.

Ron Clark’s first collection of poetry is in three sections, followed
by a prose epilogue. Poems are sorted only loosely into the first and
third sections, which do not yield a sense of emerging pattern; the
epilogue describes the first section, for example, as dealing with
“love, loss, and birds of all descriptions, as well as the beauty of
babes and the holiness of the earth.” In contrast, the middle section
“Bottled Blues,” is movingly focused, offering reflections on
fatherhood and being a son. Here relations between poems lend a larger
unity of sense.

The lack of overall pattern in the outer sections corresponds to a
recurring difficulty in giving meaning to images within individual
poems. The phrase “Gryphon’s egg” in “The Beginning of
Parting” may alert the reader to a mythological allusion; but the
image hangs self-consciously at the end of the poem, insufficiently
linked to the preceding imagery. “No / mind” in “The Great White
Pelicans” may allude to philosophical and religious literature; but
such external connections cannot substitute for work that needs to be
done within the poem, to make it whole. It is as though the unifying
pattern for the outer sections, and for a number of individual poems
within them, can be provided only in a separate prose commentary. But
this circumstance marks a failure in poetry. Clark seems to recognize
his dilemma here. After commenting, in the epilogue, that the poems do
not require prose explication, he feels compelled to give it anyway.

The strength and exciting promises of this collection lies in its
meditations on fatherhood and being a son. Here, in one poem after
another, Clark draws together the biographical or autobiographical with
the mythic and fabulous, in an impressive binocular vision. “Bottle,
Box, Circle Squared” reflects on a separated couple, as they grow old.
The binocular vision gives a deepened and universal sense of their
paradoxically self-imposed but still inescapable alienation from each
other. “The Essential Father” is a marvelous autobiographical but
mythic celebration of a father’s creative care at bath- and
storytelling-time that, in its very movement, plays imaginatively with
the art of storytelling.