John Clarke • Good Lonely Day

John Clarke writes beautifully about the natural world, about marshes, orchards, blackbirds, deer, a one-footed pheasant, or the arrival of “first snow / tapping its small canes.” His poems, like the country night sky to which he often calls our attention, glitter with fine detail, are compact and tightly tuned with a Zen-like clarity of line. A Good Lonely Day is essentially about watching that leads to seeing, about inner and outer weather. Clarke’s poems register both the small and immense changes that seasons, days, and hours bring; they are a source of beauty and wisdom that invite a reader to return.
   • Peter Makuck, founding editor of Tar River Poetry and author of Off-Season in the Promised Land