Synopses & Reviews
Jeanne E. Clark heeds Dickinson's advice to tell all the truth and tell it slant. Rather than settling for the preening gush or anecdotal flatness of much contemporary poetry, her work travels down roads named Bluelick and Slabtown to retrieve a rich sense of place and a sinewy American language. Like the best blues songs, these poems create an oblique music of leaps and gaps; they let reticence reverberate and sing. The world of Ohio Blue Tips is a place of Marlowe beds and Coniber traps, bluegills and yellow rutabaga, pronating arches and charcoal briquets. It is an interior furnished with Moo-Cow Creamers, eyelet tableskirts, and Mae West cats. Clark's implied narratives confront class and aspiration in the unfamed lives of Joe Silver, a retarded prisoner "whose eyes are the blue tips of kitchen matches," and Quinn Margaret who is "Backslidden and given over / To a reprobate mind."
Synopsis
With Ohio Blue Tips, Jeanne E. Clark's first collection of poetry, the reader is transported to Ohio's vast middle farmland, inescapable and without end, where her poems testify to the vulnerability of damaged souls and the incandescent reprieve of a moment's desire. In this landscape, common objects like a Bel-Air station wagon and "summer squash that in one day / Outgrows the garden" inhabit a world that vibrates with a sinister hum, becoming the combustible center of an otherwise ordinary life where everyone, even in this flat country of distant families, has the sudden potential to catch fire.
About the Author
Jeanne E. Clark was born and raised in Northwest Ohio. She teaches Creative Writing at Arizona State University and for the Arizona Commission on the Arts as an Artist-in-Education. She was the winner of the 1995 Loft Prize in Poetry.