Clay
Published on 28. April 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
92 pages
978-1-63243-167-7 (ISBN)
Description
Poetry that finds meaning and connection in the process of creating pottery from clay.
The poems in Clay look to the process of forming clay on a potter's wheel to examine our sense of touch and texture, emptiness, fragility, and the nature of time. Martha Ronk moves through the steps of creating a pot that must be formed, dried, bisque-fired, glazed, and fired again. This practice is paralleled in Ronk's process-oriented language that addresses how we read texture and color, the ways history and landscapes appear in glazes, Mimbres bowls that covered the faces of the dead, and Giorgio Morandi's still life paintings of ceramic forms.
For Ronk, pottery raises questions about the value of repetition, inevitable failure, and how we may become one with matter. As the potter's hands ache and age, the bowl seems to age as it slumps or breaks. Clay includes observations from other potters and writers as well as small photographs of pots.
The poems in Clay look to the process of forming clay on a potter's wheel to examine our sense of touch and texture, emptiness, fragility, and the nature of time. Martha Ronk moves through the steps of creating a pot that must be formed, dried, bisque-fired, glazed, and fired again. This practice is paralleled in Ronk's process-oriented language that addresses how we read texture and color, the ways history and landscapes appear in glazes, Mimbres bowls that covered the faces of the dead, and Giorgio Morandi's still life paintings of ceramic forms.
For Ronk, pottery raises questions about the value of repetition, inevitable failure, and how we may become one with matter. As the potter's hands ache and age, the bowl seems to age as it slumps or breaks. Clay includes observations from other potters and writers as well as small photographs of pots.
Reviews / Votes
"These poems seem to 'pass through another body with cloud-like ease,' as they reveal the movement from skin to world, lump of clay to wall, from pot shard to bone. Their intimate exchanges with touch bring us back to our senses, where we feel the empty space and the vessel itself, the way language holds meaning, beautifully moving us to "the not-yet-conceived/thought of the under leaf."-- Eleni Sikelianos "What is a bowl? A vase? Any thrown vessel? Is it not, above all, an envelope for emptiness? And what is it, then, to leave that vessel empty? The courage of emptiness-to welcome it, to plumb it, and above all, to feel it with the fingertips-drives this hybrid text in which memoir, quotation, and gorgeous lyricism track a network of inter-cultural traditions all based on clay. Ronk finds an aerial lightness in this famously heavy material while simultaneously, through it, celebrating the weight of the world."
-- Cole Swensen "In this vibrant encomium to fragility and what endures, Martha Ronk engages the practice of pottery, an 'ancient material language, each letter felt by hand.' Like Morandi, whose presence is vivid here, Ronk has a deep, abiding respect for objects in their unfolding, as they 'extend beyond' and 'darkly through,' their textures curved 'around the zero of air.' Admixed with citations and still-life photographs, Clay is a meditation on being and touch, reminding us that 'human' and 'earth' emerge from a single root. A projective verse of the body and wheel, of tenmoku and celadon, this book spins lyrically inwardly, desirous of "holding emptiness itself."
-- Andrew Zawacki
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Richmond, CA
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 226 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
159 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-63243-167-7 (9781632431677)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Martha Ronk is the author of thirteen books of poetry, a memoir, and a collection of short stories, Glass Grapes. Her books include The Place One Is, A Myth of Ariadne, Silences, Ocular Proof, Transfer of Qualities (longlisted for the National Book Award), and in a landscape of having to repeat. Her work has been included in the anthologies Lyric Postmodernisms, American Hybrid, Not for Mothers Only, and most recently in North American Women Poets in the 21st Century. She is the emeritus Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles.