The Dwelling of Weather

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Hilary Clark has a mystic’s sense of the mystery in the world, but she
conveys her insights through the minutiae of experience, much of it
involving the sorts of nature observations that Theodore Roethke used in
his poems of spiritual longing. Marianne Moore said that “the power of
the visible is the invisible,” and Clark finds evidence of that power
in what can be seen. Her brief lines are annotations of the invisible
with sharp images, especially images of weather. At times the reader may
crave more development, fewer notes and more sustained revelations—an
extended weather report rather than endless brief readings of spiritual
temperatures. She herself describes a poem as a provisional shelter, but
sometimes we like to find that the poet has built a permanent structure.
“Dwelling,” a lengthy journal in poetic prose, is the most elaborate
work and the most satisfying. This is a mature collection of poems, a
step on the spiritual path.