Perfect Marriage of Sound and Meaning

The epigraph in George David Clark’s latest collection, Newly Not Eternal, is Ecclesiastes 3:10-11: “I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time.” The collection explores suffering, God, and beauty—and God and beauty always win. Clark has found his way through suffering to make, with God, poems that are abundantly beautiful and hopeful.

Poetry offers many types of pleasure. As young children, we revel in the sound before we know what the words mean. That delight in the sound of language can last our entire life, even as we mature and begin to look for meaning in the words. Poets do their best to create poems in which sound and meaning are perfectly married. And once in a while, the sound and meaning of a poem may cooperate to create what poet Josephine Jacobsen calls “the instant of knowing”: an epiphany, a sudden revelation of something about the universe that we hadn’t understood just a moment before.

This epiphany cannot be told to us: we have to experience it. There are no instructions on how to make it happen, no math or measurement to determine whether it happens—but when it does, it’s unmistakable.

For this instant of knowing to happen for the reader, it must first happen for the poet. It’s a rare phenomenon for even the best, most skillful, most prolific poets, but it’s what poets work and hope for. In this collection, Clark seems to have experienced epiphany regularly and found a way to offer it to us. Consider the opening poem.

Mosquito

God was only acting godly
when he strapped a dirty needle
to the fly
and taught it how to curtsy
on our knees and elbows

on our necks and earlobes
so politely that it hardly
stirs an eye.
God was hard but speaking softly
when He told us we should die.

“Mosquito” leads us to see that abhorrent bloodsucker from a new perspective—as a graceful creature that God created on purpose. That’s a lot to ask of us—and then we trip on the surprise of the last two lines. They stop us cold. They feel, at first, unrelated to what comes before. A good poem’s job is to show us—show us, not tell us—the relationship between things. So how does the first part of the poem lead into those last two lines? The instant of knowing will happen when we finally grasp the wholeness of this little poem.

As you read “Mosquito” out loud—and poetry is meant to be read out loud—notice the lovely joke that Clark plays on us. On the page, he breaks his lines in unexpected places, but to the ear they are beautifully metrical and lyrical—and the ear is what matters. The stark meaning in this poem is crooned like a lullaby. In seeming chaos, we discover a natural order. Out of a burden, beauty.

The collection’s title comes from “The First Supper,” in which Clark’s wife nurses their just-born son.

The First Supper

Newly not eternal,
       newly partly
past, he’s here by way
       of forty weeks
inside another volatile
       physique.
He’s purple, then he quickly
       pinks and hardly
breathes before we see
       he’s breathing fine.
It’s only seconds
       till he’s at her breast—
the sweet colostrum
       like a spurt of fresh
infinity injected
       into time.

While his mother’s left hand
       cups his puckered feet,
her right palm guides him
       to this cup his birth
has made her. It’s an image
       she rehearsed
all night as each worse spasm
       struck its peak,
as blood spilled, body broke,
       and she defeated
labor so her urgent son
       could nurse.

“Newly not eternal, newly partly past:” This baby has already lived through forty weeks of constant formation. He slides into present and future formation by the natural act of nursing. The baby is both a small event and a miracle. Nursing is a small event—and everything: literally life or death. Like most true things, this is all paradox. The poem mirrors the paradox by showing how everyday speech can be smooth and metrical, can contain rhyme, and can evoke the indescribable. More paradox: this very physical poem portraying the pain of childbirth gives a glimpse through the veil and into the ineffable, which is always joyful.

Remember Ecclesiastes: “I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time.” Beauty comes from suffering, not in place of suffering. Clark and his wife had twin boys, but one died at birth. The centerpiece of this collection is a truncated sonnet crown giving various glimpses of that fact. (A sonnet crown is a series of sonnets on a single topic, each of whose last line becomes the first line in the next sonnet.) The “Ultrasound” series is composed of seven sonnets (which don’t look like sonnets at all) and four related poems. Here is the sixth sonnet.

Ultrasound: Your Urn

Tonight Pete’s teething
       on your mom’s Bluetooth.

He found the scissors
       to derange his hair.

We’ve left the gate
       down and he’s on the stairs,

or else he’s scrambled
       up a dollhouse roof.

The crumpled books
       and cracker crumbs are proof

he’s loose . . . disordered
       blocks, a toppled chair. . . .

Some days he’s absolutely
       everywhere

until I wish him gone,
       to tell the truth.

Not you. You stay
       exactly as you’re left:

the tame and quiet twin,
       the easy one,

the boy who never
       makes a mess, the son

whose whispered name
       will be our shibboleth

for innocence, whose
       only fault is done,

who never cries, or fights,
       or takes a breath.

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility,” wrote Wordsworth. The tranquility in this poem, in the whole sonnet crown, and in the entire collection, really, is fiercely hard-won. From what we can only imagine must have been utter heartbreak, Clark has groped his way toward acceptance. He does not declaim his suffering; he has absorbed and transmuted it, much as Christ’s mother did all her adult life. The poem is wrenching in its perfect marriage of powerful feeling expressed quietly and from a slight distance, rhymed and metered and held in the lovely formal box that is a sonnet.

Throughout the collection, in the context of both normal everyday suffering and the other, worse kind, Clark finds beauty. Always beauty.

Washing Your Feet

Stranger, they are dirty.
       You’ve come so far
so harshly: bloody miles
       through silt and brambles,
noxious bogs and mud-fields,
       dunes of char
beneath the sun-spill—
       all of it in sandals.

Please take my chair;
       this dry blond Scotch on ice
will douse your pride.
       I kneel to yawn the straps
that bite your ankles,
       loose the vamps that vise
your tarsals, slide
       bruised heels into my lap.

There’s fragrant water
       in the wooden vessel,
sanded smooth and gauged
       so that your stride
can lose its travel
       in the lather’s pestle
and cascade. You’re no one,
       and you’re special,
drawn to leave
       before you’re even dried,
the paths bathed off
       revealing paths inside.

A kind, generous act seems to have no point, no result, but itself, yet the poem celebrates the recipient, not the giver. The measured, pervasive word-music is understood to be as significant as the words’ meaning, which will take time to unwind. This is not the place for exegesis, and sometimes the beautiful cannot be explained, but Clark is not toying with us here. Live with this poem for a while. You’ll be rewarded.

In its consistent marriage of form and content, sound and meaning, this collection by George David Clark ranks among the best published in recent years. There is delight of one sort or another on every page. Buy this book—and for Heaven’s sake, read these poems out loud.

Newly Not Eternal
by George David Clark
Louisiana State University Press, 2024
Paperback, 98 pages