Stray Home (Volume 17)

Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

by Amy M. Clark

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2009.

With poems that combine the self-scrutiny of Philip Larkin with the measure of Elizabeth Bishop, Amy M. Clark burnishes her first collection, Stray Home, with exquisite understatement and formal control. Sweeter than Larkin and more intimate than Bishop, these poems address the suppressed pain and shame of living as a childless woman in a world of mothers, the dissociation attendant on depression and fraught family relationships, and the search for a sense of belonging in the face of dislocation. Stray Home cuts deeply to discover the buried emotions and insights universal to all suffering and compassionate human beings.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published March 23, 2010

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a love/hate relationship with poetic form. I love reading poets' works when they excel at form, especially the sonnet and the sestina. Once, I even had a student who wrote a funny sonnet about his landlord. I, however, struggle with form, and the only form poem I have ever written (and been happy with...) is the pantoum.

So, I was delighted to come across Stray Home, Amy M. Clark's first book of poetry and the winner of the 2009 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Maura Stanton, in her backcover blurb, states that "Clark doesn't hesitate to look at 'the treasury of muck' between the stove and the cupboard or uncover the uneasy feeling you have when someone hands you a new baby or you feed your dog a biscuit when you know she's scheduled to die in the morning." And certainly, there is a darkness in Clark's work, that blackness that is found in so many everyday life events and scenes. For instance, in "Daughter for My Prayer" the speaker cheers on a daughter saying "I spot my daughter on the stage and blush/with love. She is my own scrub weed among/other curious shoots." However, at the end of the poem we learn the truth about what turned out to be an imagined scene: "Unwind this song I've sung/I have no daughter. She could be anyone."

However, what I was most impressed with was the way that Clark plays with form. Many of her poems are sonnets, and my favorite work titled "First Thing This Morning" is one where the persona examines her kitchen in the morning:

First Thing This Morning

For once I’d like to walk across this floor
without sticking to it, I think on my way
to the coffee pot. Squatting with damp paper
towel, I swipe at gin stains, strawberry
asterisks, my glasses-missing near sight
fixing next on a greasy Rorschach blot
a square away, where from my kneeling height
I can see clear into that awful half-inch slot
between the stove and the cupboard, a treasury
of muck. I sit. All these years
together, we haven’t been cleaning. Merely
rearranging. I can’t explain these tears.
What is sad about fallen strands of hair,
plastic twistees, and sun-swirling dust in the air.


The title poem, "Stray Home" is found in the center of the collection and is composed of several smaller sonnets, most exploring the speaker's relationship with the women in her family and with womanhood in general, especially with the body. For instance, in one of the poetic sequences, the speaker explains that as a child she "lay face down/on my bed, scissoring my thighs like angel wings/calling 'Mom! Try this. It feels so good"/She singed me to the core: 'Don't do that/anymore. I didn't. For a good long time." In another part, the speaker compares her body with the bodies of her mother's and grandmother's, saying "We were three candle boats -- my grandmother/mother, and me --- moored, we bobbed together."

Another favorite poem is not a sonnet, but has a form all of its own. In "Dumb" the persona retells a childhood incident in rhyme:

Dumb

But the babysiter said, ‘Lick
the porch railing.’ We watched her flick
an ash onto the snow, air thick

with her mouth’s steam. Sugary frost
laced the black rail. My brother crossed
his arms. ‘Girls first,’ he said. I lost

right from wrong. I put my tongue
on the ice-hot iron. Tears stung
my eyelids. Unseeing, I hung

by my dumb cut tongue, I despised
my feet in their fool, over-sized
boots. My brother, galvanized,

fetching a glass, poured a waterfall
over the rail, releasing me. A pall
came between us. I was a small

stain. Nobody likes to be near
the betrayed. The sitter kept clear.
‘You should’ve known better,’ my dear


brother said. It was I who consoled
him. Absolving him of the cold
backbite of his treachery, I told

him I did know better. Good girl,
dumb, chilled, little sister, when will
you make iron of your own will?

Certainly, the rhythm may sound like a light nursery rhyme, but the theme and underlying message is anything but.

Make no mistake -- this collection is not a work of pure form. Several poems, including "Looking for Z--" and "How to Be the Lady of the House." (In fact, another poem, "The Grizzly Bear in February" somehow reminds me of Suzanne Vega's song, "Tom's Diner" ) follow a more prose poem form. Still, because of common themes that hold this collection together, these more "prosey" poems never seem to be out of place.

Stray Home is a great read. The poetic form found in its pages never feels forced or full of clichés. Whether you are a fan of formal verse or just like to "dabble", Stray Home is a collection to pick up this summer.

Here are two additional links to Clark's work:

Clark's website

http://www.amymclark.com/poems.htm

"Why We Love Our Dogs" on Verse Daily

http://www.versedaily.org/2010/welove...



Note: I was granted permission by both the poet and the press to recopy the two full poems found in this review.

[Pita-eater · Rating 2 out of 5]

I came across the poem "Our Friends in Minnesota" and kind of liked it. So, I decided to track down the book of poetry it came from. Clark's poems often pull the rug out from under you. In "Our Friends in Minnesota" it works pretty well. In other poems, though, her conventions left me feeling uneasy, confused, or just plain "no thanks." One reviewer on the back cover writes, "How often does a contemporary poem induce genuine terror?" Yeah. This collection was not my cup of tea

[Amy]

The sonnet sequence entitled "Stray Home" is stellar. Clark is a MASTER of quiet, subtle use of traditional poetic form.