What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, our editorial board members reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay. 
let’s take the high path
that clings to the cliff edge
through the ripe barley
past the corn marigolds
taking up this and that
dropping this or that


like a rag or a flag
space flaps in the wind
fluttering and settling
between scabious
and knapweed the sea
flutters lightly away


trust the tangled path
the sea at your elbow
it will lead you through
complex information
meadow-grass and bent-grass
to a fine sea view


in among the grasses
are the manifold
spaces little places
where intention is
no longer gathered
but ramified dispersed


pale comfrey flowers
linger in green spaces
in the tall bracken
as if such spaces were
formed by bracken for
pale comfrey flowers


melancholy thistle
rest harrow, milk vetch
climb through the long grasses
to add at random
a touch of colour
to the drift of colours


the waves are dancing
and the light bounces back
into a larger
atmosphere or climate
that you move in gladly
in receipt of light


over the tall grasses
the blue sky stretches
an unimpeded blue
you can lie back in
crushed grasses and let
your head fill up with blue


swallows swooping low
over the ripe barley
respond as keenly
to the intelligence
as barley to the least
rumour of a breeze


barley combed by the wind
ripples with warm light
as if the light were not
given but contained
given out when combed
by the light-seeking wind


the waves of the barley
the ripples of the sea
flow in or out from
your feet as you pass through
the ripples of the barley
the waves of the sea


as a hawthorn will show
the prevailing wind
in a motionless gust
of whipped-back branches
you take the shape of
what you know let it go
from the book THE THREADBARE COAT: SELECTED POEMS / Carcanet Press
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Cover of Thomas A. Clark's The Threadbare Coat: Selected Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Susan Tichy on Thomas A. Clark's The Threadbare Coat

"Unlike volumes that map a career, guiding readers through each book a poet has published, The Threadbare Coat offers poems from various publications sequenced to lead us anew up paths and across hillsides, to 'the fort of stillness' or 'the quiet island,' into 'woods & water' and 'sweet vernal grass,' at the speed of footsteps or the 'speed of the running wave.'"
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Color head-and-shoulders sketch of Rita Dove
By the Book: Rita Dove

"[W]hen I was compiling my 'Collected Poems,' the entire trajectory of my artistic life was laid out before me: I couldn’t avoid it. How fearless those early poems were! P.C. issues, sensitivity and discretion be damned: If the poem called, I answered, bold and clear."

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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