Taking Eden

Robert Clinton was born and raised in upstate New York. He studied at Union College and received an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College in 1979. He has worked at many jobs in many places, mostly as a carpenter and cabinet-maker, and is currently a designer for a custom cabinet shop in Boston. His poems have appeared in journals such as Anteaus, Prairie Schooner, The Atlantic Monthly and Ploughshares,"Perhaps what's so refreshing about Taking Eden is that it fits into no neat category. There's a sensitivity in it to the natural world, but the phrase 'nature poetry' certainly doesn't apply; many of the poems use a narrative structure, yet 'narrative poetry,' too, seems inaccurate. The surreal leaves its tracks throughout the book, but they are as delicate as the traces left by subatomic particles in a Wilson's cloud chamber, dispersing as soon as they are seen, reabsorbed into the other events of these poems. Clinton's imagination is multidimensional, and the pleasures of Taking Eden are accordingly complex. While the poems here share some qualities-an alertness couched in simple diction, often-they do not predict one another. This is especially admirable in a first book. . . . Robert Clinton is a poet with a unique outlook. . . . Taking Eden has a maturity that bodes well for Clinton's future work: these poems grow more like oak than ailanthus; they are dense and strong."-The Boston Book Review"Many of the thirty-nine poems in Robert Clinton's first book of poetry, Taking Eden, seem at once autobiographical and universally appealing."-Independent Publisher"'Some days are holidays of silence,' Clinton writes in 'My Father;' his most introspective and lonely short work owes much to the early Mark Strand. His more narrative poems relate visionary, solitary encounters with bearers of wisdom, frequently father-substitutes but sometimes the speaker's own father, who form an understated lineage: 'The men I know / born in labor all of them // go along the rock / the way I go without / much hesitation.' In 'Treetops,' a 'son who will remain unborn' finds the poet 'in the shade of the house collecting stones,' 'he stands up, / pushing the house into the