O Lucky Day

Patricia Clark’s latest poetry collection O Lucky Day explores her concerns about family and mortality, silence and loneliness, widening to include losses in the natural world. These sorrows often emerge along with an exuberance found in the sensual pleasures of taste and touch. Clark trains herself “to disappear, into the shagbark / hickory, the scarred maple, / the viburnum just about to flower.” She knows that whatever upheaval we bring to the world, and ourselves, “something was broken, then healed, then / transformed.” She advises us to “loaf and ponder,” but also to rise with the rustling grasses in lament of environmental degradation, voicing our insistence for reverence of what remains. These lyric poems of intensity and acute detail render the physical world in its tattered glory.