Farm by the Shore
Published on 31. August 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
104 pages
978-1-78410-352-1 (ISBN)
Description
Shortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award
In Farm by the Shore, Thomas A Clark continues his investigations into the landscape and culture of the Scottish highlands and islands. His brief notations and fragments embody the precarious balance between sea and land, wilderness and civilisation, while everything is played out in a context of weather. The spaces between the poems, which both link and divide them, are shades of quiet, indications of time or distance, or graphs of the vagaries of attention. In such a climate, to farm, or walk, or write, is to persist. You come to one thing and then another.
In Farm by the Shore, Thomas A Clark continues his investigations into the landscape and culture of the Scottish highlands and islands. His brief notations and fragments embody the precarious balance between sea and land, wilderness and civilisation, while everything is played out in a context of weather. The spaces between the poems, which both link and divide them, are shades of quiet, indications of time or distance, or graphs of the vagaries of attention. In such a climate, to farm, or walk, or write, is to persist. You come to one thing and then another.
Reviews / Votes
'With radical simplicity, Thomas A Clark's writing gives us the unfussy beauty of the natural world. There's not much that I ask of poetry that isn't present here.'Matthew Welton 'A remarkable portrayal of our contemplative relationship with nature.'
Church Times Best Books of 2017 'Meaning is discovered between spaces, silences heard between sound...a vitally alert poet.'
London Magazine 'In short, one-breath clusters of lines, Clark meditates on the details one might observe during a contemplative and solitary walk through remote countryside. His diction is perfectly pitched and his grammar exact...this is about a man's spiritual need for the humblest manifestations of nature.'
Philip Rush, The North
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
Dimensions
Height: 138 mm
Width: 215 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
146 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78410-352-1 (9781784103521)
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Person
Thomas A Clark lives in a fishing village on the east coast of Scotland. Five books of his poetry have been published by Carcanet, including The Hundred Thousand Places (2009), Yellow & Blue (2014), Farm by the Shore (2017), The Threadbare Coat (2020) and that which appears (2024). Numerous small books, cards and editions from his own Moschatel Press investigate ways that the presentation of poetry can inform sense and nuance. During the summer months, with the artist Laurie Clark, he runs Cairn Gallery, a space for minimal and conceptual art.