Kevin Clark Poetry
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“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

—Mark Twain

“A work of art is never completed, merely abandoned.”

—Paul Valery

“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”

—David Hare

“For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I already knew.”

—Robert Frost

“In the midst of our happiness we were very pleased.”

—Gertrude Stein

“I like restraint—if doesn’t go too far.”

—Mae West

“The art of running the mile consists, in essence, of reaching the threshold of consciousness at the instant of breasting the tape.”

—Paul O’Neil

“Poetry is a dream dreamed in the presence of reason.”

—Tommaso Ceva

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?”

—Satchell Page

“Keep your eye clear and hit ’em where they ain’t.”

—Wee Willie Keeler

“There is only one plot: Things are not what they seem.”

—Jim Thompson

“Poetry begins where certitude ends.”

—Eavan Boland

“Let’s play two.”

—Ernie Banks

The Consecrations

The Consecrations Book Cover

Published by Stephen F. Austin University Press
Buy at Amazon Buy at Publisher
Read Interview Watch Intro Video
Cover Art: Amarylis by Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz, oil on plasticized Hydrocal, 7″ x 11″
Called “tough, taut, and tender” by celebrated feminist author Sandra Gilbert, the “muscular narratives [and the] skillfully paced elegies and meditations” of The Consecrations hold to human love and empathy as tools to help weather what can seem imminent threats against personal and public life.

“Among other things, the book’s many-angled focus is with a future that is never revealed until it is upon us,” said Clark. “I wrote almost all these poems before COVID, and the pandemic now casts them in greater relief even though the disease isn’t mentioned. How do we approach what we can’t know—and how do we cope? I try to look squarely at such uncertainty with the hope that the best elements of human desire can sustain us.”

As poet and commentator Paisley Rekdal notes, The Consecrations is marked by both “complex and highly readable poems [that] refuse to ignore the fact of our physical suffering even as the book finally celebrates the desires that keep us tethered to the world.”

“Kevin’s imagination radiates in many directions and consistently takes readers into surprising realms without ever losing contextual sight of terra firma,” says SFAUP publisher Kim Verhines. “In any poem, you may find yourself happily bewildered, strangely buoyant or caught off-guard, even a bit frightened,” says Verhines, “but the musicality of each tight line keeps you moving toward the possibility of resolution.”

Perhaps unusual for our times, The Consecrations occasionally insists on the potential of romantic love. “Throughout the book, a powerful loveliness and affirmation for things made holy encompass Clark’s poems,” observes Mark Sanders, winner of the Western Heritage Award.  “We understand: faith, love, and commitment obliterate walls, and take us to sight beyond sight.”

Praise for The Consecrations

Kevin Clark’s The Consecrations is a timely book about fear and faith—in particular, the many spiritual, philosophical, and familial beliefs that keep us afloat through the crises that punctuate our lives. These complex and highly readable poems, where ‘heaven’s just a wet dream,’ refuse to ignore the fact of our physical suffering even as the book finally celebrates the desires that keep us tethered to the world.

—Paisley Rekdal, author of Nightingale and The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam

Kevin Clark’s wide-ranging poems—muscular narratives, skillfully paced elegies and meditations—are taut, tough, and tender. The Consecrations radiates love, material and spiritual.

—Sandra M. Gilbert, author of Judgment Day and On Burning Ground: Thirty Years of Thinking about Poetry

Throughout the book, a powerful loveliness and affirmation for things made holy encompass Clark’s poems. We understand: faith, love, and commitment obliterate walls and take us to sight beyond sight.

—Mark Sanders, winner of the Western Heritage Award and author of Conditions of Grace: New and Selected Poems

Sample Poems

Two Stories
Admitting Belief
In Between

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