Breakfast of the Magi

Laurence Steven is a professor of English at Laurentian University and
the author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s Fiction.

J. Livingstone Clark can be a frustrating poet. He can do so much with
words and situations, yet often wastes both on subjects he’s obsessive
about. For Clark, “careful bright words” have the power to
“proffer ... grace” (“The Bright Words”) and yet at the same
time he sees the trajectory of the larger life as being toward
transcendence and away from language. In “Epiphany, September 1991,”
for example, “Thunderheads boil in from Rosetown / and the
multifoliate sky / blossoms forth forms unseen / in a sacristy of
silence.” The movement here from energy to silence seems to conflict
with the obvious attention Clark pays to “careful bright words.”

The conflicting inclinations are caught in “Cool Respite in White.”
Here the poet catches “the plenitude of beauty” in a sudden turn of
his lover’s face and neck: “And for a moment out of time / The dying
animal froze / Looking out the window, / Passing muster on the roses, /
While I froze with her, / Love giving such solace, / Cool respite in
white / From the grim quick times.” The fullness of life in its
livingness seems to get lost here. We have only the extremes: the
transcendent moment on one side, and the “grim quick times” on the
other. There is little sense of the middle term—the world of the
more-than-banal yet less-than-transcendent most of us inhabit.