Book Review: Reveille by George David Clark
2015
winner of the Miller Williams poetry prize from the University of Arkansas
Press, George David Clark’s Reveille,
rings in each poetic section with a reveille, or a wake-up call. Clark defines
and creates his own meaning for this term—the title Reveille creates a “call” for the rest of the book, transporting
the reader into the author’s painterly world of “a lattice musics,” “a bathing
suit red as tomatoes,” “the gloss of lacquered walnut golds and olives jigsaw,”
and “the holy face plum-colored.” Clark uses touches of color to guide the
reader through this imaginary world that borders on the holy, and the first
section opens with “Reveille on a Silent Whistle,” with its angelic imagery of
“Two seraphs in the live oak’s highest boughs are sleeping,/constructing
minutely their crystalline fretwork.”
Each section
of this collection opens with a reveille, which becomes the framing device of
the book. Reveille not only wakes up the reader into this world, but in each
sectional reveille, the reader is introduced to another aspect of Clark’s
world. Imagery that is biblically influenced, painterly-produced, and sublime
floods these slow-paced and careful poems. For example, the second section
opens with “Reveille with Kazoo.” Clark’s speaker travels this dream-like
musicality:
From your
overlong, even invincible sleep;
from the
pink and orange moth-scales
that collect
on your mind like a dust;
from the
stately plush where you jonah
in a bottled
frigate’s belly;
from this
lopsided aerie of marigold sheets:
wake up.
In this
opening stanza, Clark’s anaphora builds up this dream, only to culminate the
reader into a “wake up.” The language is sensual, the lines gingerly
lengthened, building up the dream and moving back and forth between the
spiritual, with the reference to Jonah, and the spiritual turned down-to-earth,
with “this lopsided aerie of marigold sheets.” Clark’s painterly quality is
also gradual: he gives us gradients of color, only to wake us up into another
world, this one postmodern: “The swimming pools/of the future were born this
morning.” And with each section reveille, comes multiple turns. The following
poem, “Interview Conducted Through the Man-Eater’s Throat,” takes us to the
opposite spectrum of colors with “Like the blue-black char in a chimney.” The
poem also takes us to the opposite spectrum, challenging form in stanzas filled
with question and answer. In fact, Clark utilizes the musicality of the opening
to formally influence and pervade the rest of this section.
Clark
pushes the modern even more with “Reveille with Reimbursement.” The collection
may start with the mythical and spiritual, but Clark is able to ground and
transform the book’s movement into the present day. We close with “Reveille
with Lullabies,” a strategic bookend that takes the reader deep into the
speaker’s persona and subconscious. Clark leaves us with a blessing:
We rise when
something calls us out of bed
Your song’s
not addressed to the dark
We wake in
Or for you
as you dress in the dark
…
Rise now
rise now and bless us
till our cries
lie down cry less
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George David Clark's poem, "Shadows of the Antediluvian Soldier," appeared in issue 44 of Hayden's Ferry Review.
Dorothy Chan was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Plume, Spillway, and The Great American Poetry Show. In 2012, The Writing Disorder nominated her poem, “Ikebukuro Train Rides” for a Pushcart.
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George David Clark's poem, "Shadows of the Antediluvian Soldier," appeared in issue 44 of Hayden's Ferry Review.
Dorothy Chan was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Plume, Spillway, and The Great American Poetry Show. In 2012, The Writing Disorder nominated her poem, “Ikebukuro Train Rides” for a Pushcart.