Synopses & Reviews
from “Clayfeld’s Farewell Epistle to Bob Pack”
Beneath this mellow harvest moon,
I can still picture you—a boy content
just fishing with his father from a ledge
above a foaming stream. The flailing trout
you caught is packed in gleaming ice;
the pink stripe all along its side
is smeared across black shiny dots
that seem to shine with their own light.
I’m sure that you can picture me
with equal vividness, and though we’re not
identical, there is a sense
in which I am inventing you
as much as you’re inventing me.
In Clayfeld Holds On, Robert Pack offers his readers a comprehensive portrait of his longtime protagonist Clayfeld, who is also Pack’s doppelgänger, his alternate self, enacting both the life that the poet has lived and the life he might have lived, given his proclivities and appetites. Poet and protagonist, taken together, are self and consciousness of self, the historical self and the embellished story of that literal self.
Written with a masterly ear for rhythm, and interweaving narrative and lyrical passages, the poems recount Clayfeld’s formative memories while exploring concepts such as loyalty, generosity, commitment, as well as cosmic phenomena such as the big bang theory and black holes. Through all of this, Pack attempts to find purpose and meaning in an indifferent universe, and to explore the labyrinth of his own proliferating identity.
Review
"Robert Pack is one of the poets by whom our culture will be known in times to come."
Review
"In his stunning, brilliant new collection, Clayfeld Holds On, the octogenarian Robert Pack revisits the lamp-lit chambers of his alter ego, Clayfeld (Old Adam) some thirty years on. These poems are hard-won, informed with a rare wit, compendium of knowledge, and deep intelligence, by turns heartbreaking, full of wisdom and a Swiftian sense of the folly of human endeavor, and funny as hell. And then there are ghosts that recline at the table of Pack’s symposium—Freud, Job, Shakespeare, Mozart, Frost and Stevens among them—nudging him on to tell one more story, while there is still time."
Review
"Robert Pack is one of the most important poets of our epoch. In a career that exceeds fifty years he has explored his life and the lives of people in our society with unparalleled intelligence and beauty. His new book Clayfeld Holds On is remarkable for its exuberance, profundity and sheer joy. He is one of the poets by whom our culture will be known in times to come."
Review
"Clayfeld Holds On is a superb volume of late poems by Robert Pack, a singular voice in American poetry. Clayfeld is Pack’s alter-ego, raging against the dying of the light, walking down paths retaken with renewed gusto. The poet’s subtle cadences draw the reader forward through narratives of recovery toward self-discoveries that are world-discoveries as well. Clayfeld Holds On is a satisfying and resonant collection, a vision of reality that is gripping and profound."
Review
"Robert Pack writes in a compassionate voice, full of humor and sorrow for all the losses, and yet always ready to take on more."
Review
"There are great pleasures in reading Robert Pack’s Clayfeld Holds On. Pack's new collection of poems is a culminating achievement by this deeply serious and at the same time irrepressibly playful writer."
Synopsis
Robert Pack is a narrative master blessed with a keen ear for everyday speech. In poems that recall Robert Frost's meditative regard of nature, Pack's newest collection, Elk in Winter, resolves universal questions in the particular, the personal, and the intimate. This rich and varied volume moves from comedy to elegy, from lyric to narrative, in which individual characters are revealed and rendered symbolic by the stories that enclose them. What finally unites the poems of Elk in Winter is Pack's desire to appeal to the ear as much as to the heart, and to discover and reveal the passionate music of ideas.
Synopsis
In this new collection, Robert Pack reprises Clayfeld, a character he created in 1987, who is the book’s protagonist as well as Pack’s doppelgänger and alternate self, the self that both enacts the life that Pack has lived through his dramatic exchanges with Clayfeld, as well as the life Pack “might” have lived, given their shared proclivities and appetites. Written in short, rhythmic lines, the lyrical narrative recounts Clayfeld’s and Pack’s formative memories, anecdotes, and episodes involving parents, family, and friends, all against a backdrop of the natural world, the lakes, mountains, birds, and wild animals that have always been a fundamental part of Pack’s writings. In colloquial and lucid language, the poems explore a number of concepts and beliefs—such as loyalty, generosity, commitment, and an awareness of the cosmos—as Pack reminds us of the mysteries and complexities of human awareness and unrelenting human desire. Above all, the persona Clayfeld loves puns and jokes, humor and music; these, he maintains, are humanity’s greatest gifts in facing contingency and loss, accepting the body’s humbling frailties, and enduring the inevitable sorrows of mortality. Together, Pack and his shadow-self enjoy what can be celebrated in the sweep of passing time, all the while acknowledging, as Clayfeld does, that he, perhaps, has “too many ironies in the fire.”
About the Author
Robert Pack is the Albernethy Professor of Literature and a Creative Writing Emeritus at Middlebury College, where he taught for thirty-four years and directed Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Currently he lives in Missoula and teaches at the Honors College of the University of Montana. He is author of eighteen books of poems, most recently, Fathering the Map, Minding the Sun, and Rounding It Out, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Bob Pack’s lnvocation to Clayfeld
Clayfeld’s Encounter by the Sea
Clayfeld Encompasses a Paradox
Clayfeld Beholds a Miracle
Clayfeld Attends a Seder
Clayfeld Admonishes the Bard
Clayfeld Defines Sublimity
Clayfeld Goes Birding
A Blue Heron Appears to Clayfeld
Clayfeld’s Kidney
Clayfeld Observes a Herd of Elk
Clayfeld Organizes His Jokes
Confronting Clayfeld
Clayfeld among the Fireflies
Clayfeld Takes Flight
Clayfeld Listens to the Aspens
Paean for a Turtle
Clayfeld Encircled
Clayfeld Unresolved
Clayfeld’s Vampire Fantasy
Clayfeld on Jury Duty
Clayfeld Throws His Hat into the Ring
Clayfeld’s Reversal
Clayfeld Reading by the Fire
Clayfeld Grieves for Annie
Clayfeld’s Inheritance
Clayfeld Addresses His Father
Drifting and Gliding
Clayfeld’s Interpretation
Clayfeld Thinks about Women
Clayfeld’s Pride
Clayfeld Bedeviled
Clayfeld’s “Cogito”
Clayfeld’s Inspiration
Clayfeld Contends with Entropy
Star-Crossed Clayfeld
Clayfeld in the Rain
Clayfeld’s Injury
Humming in the Air
Clayfeld Embellishes a Willow Tree
Clayfeld’s Farewell Epistle to Bob Pack
Epilogue: Swan River in October
Epilogue: Abundance