Jeremy Clarke, STONE HOURS

 

Angelus

An old wooden chair withthree legs | stands on the bypass
Holding a handful of rain| A monument of sky sits
On the water | A cloudcomes to the sky | stays for a time
Then | unthinking |strays |
In winter | snow’s
Slow surrender surpriseseverything |

FromBritish-born British-Canadian poet Jeremy Clarke comes STONE HOURS (TorontoON: Rufus Books, 2024), a “medieval Book of Hours reimagined in an urbanlandscape. Although devised in London, the poems, like the crosses in the city’skerbstones, stand for all that is urban.” I hadn’t heard previously of Clarke, sowas intrigued at someone seemingly out of nowhere with a 340 page volume. Accordingto online sources, he is the author of the chapbooks Incidents of Travel(2012) and Common Prayer (2012), and full-length collections Devon Hymns (2010) and Spatiamentum (2014), all published by Torontopublisher Rufus Books, as well as the privately printed illustrated booklet Cathedral(2017) and Bread of Broken Ground (2020), as well as Psalms in theVulgar Tongue (Turkey: Wounded Wolf Press, 2018). Also, according toWikipedia, Clarke was Poet in Residence at Eton College from 2010 to 2020. Whyhave I not previously heard of Jeremy Clarke? As part of his “Requiem,” heoffers:

The place where the windis always. Going

through a pile of bricksfor a single precious
stone. One red in all theold brown there

must be. Colour is whatthe light is simply
taking. The days streamand it would be

summer and everythingthriving in the arc
of its decline.Everything in its hunger

for undoing. How a wholeplace will separate
into parts to become aland of strangers.

It is being said. What iseach thing but moving
towards its owncounterweight of wild

in the adoration of thealways
emptying air. It is forthe wind

the rain will make abrown reveal its red.

Withopening poem “Angelus,” STONE HOURS (a lovely edition of 350 copies, with pressed goldfoil on the cover and flaps) works the format of the medieval Book of Hours acrossfifteen sections—“Last Dream Before Sleep,” “Tender for the Garden,” “Praise,” “Requiem,”“Night Office,” “Adam’s Lament,” “Bread of Broken Ground,” “Stonelight,” “CommonPrayer,” “Breath & Echo,” “The Desire Field,” “Psalms in the Vulgar Tongue,”“Music for Amen,” “Cathedral” and “Seven Words”—of sequential short orexpansively long poems composed as fragments, prayers, narrative stretches, momentsand meditations. The poems dig deep into such small, important moments, onesthat, at times, I wonder if there might ever be a way out. “And I am here,” hewrites, near the end of the third section/hour, “Praise,” “in a place beyonddesire or fear. / Lying watching the day / turning inside out, // pulling outthe night / until it has filled the room.”

Poetshave long been engaged with compositions around time—I could mention recentexamples including Stefania Heim’s Hour Book (Ahsahta Press, 2019) [see my review of such here] or Brenda Coultas’ The Writing of an Hour (WesleyanUniversity Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]—but the “Book of Hours” isobviously a very specific kind of liturgical meditation, engaged morespecifically over the years by poets such as bpNichol, as part of his multiple-volumelong poem, The Maryrology, or Cole Swensen, who wrote around afifteenth-century book of hours, the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry,through her Such Rich Hour (University of Iowa, 2001). For Clarke, thereisn’t the experimental push of language that some of those other examples mighthave employed, as he instead deliberately examines the structure of thosehours, those prayers and meditations, and moves across a narrative trajectory simultaneouslytimeless, ongoing and sequentially regulated. He takes a medieval form down toits roots, adding a fresh perspective across old knowledge, unfurling his lyricacross such ancient bones. As Robert Kroetsch offered via his stone hammer,when a rock becomes tool it becomes stone, and Jeremy Clarke provides. As in thepoem-section “A Mass,” as he writes:

Under weeds, tippedwaste. Old lumber, blown litter. What the light
is reaching withdiamonds. How a day is broken and distributed. Even
as an hour falls in avacant country bearing the responsibility of being
without utility. Still,each item intricate as a fingerprint in the desert
of everything taken by surprise.