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Music for a Wedding

Lauren Clark author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Pittsburgh Press

Published:9th Nov '17

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Music for a Wedding cover

The poems in Lauren Clark's debut book, Music for a Wedding, move fluidly and unforgettably between the rituals of monogamy, death, loneliness, and the body in search of what might last forever. In the abandonment of those who die and those who leave, Clark's speakers are orphic in their use of song as a mode of enduring the hours. Like sybils, Clark's poems make the entrails of what's left behind luminous, even if what is presented is darkness, "that low velvet we make / within ourselves". Their poetry is at once free of the formalities associated with lyric poetry and full of its own novel shapes that only Clark could devise. Their poetry queers our understanding of poetics and what a book of poems can be by dwelling in intimate corners of the self that may seem otherwise insensate without their taking us in to witness such depths. In Clark's hands, the whole of the world--in poetry and on the ground--is preternatural, requiring of us dedication and devotion. But not to the usual rituals of mourning and prayer. Rather, "darkness is to remind [us] what [we] could not see before", that in the absence of being with others, the only true devotion left is grief.

Lauren Clark’s imagination is, paradoxically, both torrential and discriminating. She is deeply serious and funny at the same time. Her writing is forceful and self-delighting yet minutely attentive to the world’s particulars. She deploys in her stunning poems the maximum amount of intellectual power consistent with her delicacy of perception, her subtle sonic and rhetorical modulations, and her emotional honesty and vulnerability. Her poems are a marriage and reconciliation of many if not all the disparate, contradictory, and opposing elements of our experience."" - Vijay Seshadri, judge

""Clark’s work is entirely original, but springs out of poetry’s deepest and most ancient inclinations. She establishes a relationship with the invisible and the ineffable, bringing image and language (as if by magic) to the page and to the reader. A poet of extraordinary talent and range, her first book is a collection readers will return to again and again."" - Laura Kasischke

ISBN: 9780822964995

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

96 pages