Reviewed by Grace Bauer
by Patricia Clark
ISBN 978-1-947896-27-7
2020 Terrapin Books
$16, 95 pages, Paper
Spoiler alert! Patricia Clark’s Self Portrait with a Million Dollars is not a book about a poet winning the lottery. The million dollars in the title is packed in a semi speeding down the highway on its way to a World’s Fair—an anticipated event the poet/speaker barely caught a glimpse of as a child. That is not to say the book does not contain riches. Despite that early disappointment, and the more serious losses (of family, friends, beloved pets) that are an inevitable part of living, Clark remains determined to “note what is there, what departs” and be open to “the marginal place / where beauty dwells.”
Much of the beauty Clark finds is in the world of flora and fauna, sea, and sky. Birds abound in these poems: flycatchers and waxwings, dickcissels and sharp-shinned hawks, mallards and Baltimore orioles—their names like incantations, every appearance a reminder of how quickly things pass by. The handiwork of humans is also a source of beauty Clark contemplates in numerous poems focused on paintings—often landscapes—ranging from Monet to Hiroshige and others. The interweaving of what we might call “nature poems” with ekphrasis complicates both subjects and invites us to interrogate “what we do, / living in this / world.”
In “When I Stepped Out,” Clark encounters a barred owl who stares her down from his perch on a branch, and wonders what he thinks: “Was it a simple calculation of prey, not prey?” She accepts her identity as “one of the box- / dwellers who turn the lights on at dusk,” unlike the owl or the migratory birds who announce their arrival with “tendrils of song.”
Clark’s poems have their own way of singing. Though largely free verse, plain spoken and conversational, she finds moments of musicality in ordinary speech—whether it’s the delight in naming mentioned above, or subtle uses of alliteration (“no escaping how the sea // throws you repeatedly on the rocks / of all you’re stupid about”) or anaphora to create a litany effect in poems like “After Failure,” “Kubota Garden,” “Wood Eternal,” or the title poem where the repetition of “near” (“near a painted boulder…,” “near the hill scotch-broomed gold,” “near the heart of it all”) emphasizes the irony of how distant that million dollars was and will forever remain, though “muscle memory holds so much, landscape memory, too.”
Both elegiac and celebratory, Self Portrait with a Million Dollars reminds us to pay attention, as this poet so clearly does, to those memories, our own bodies, and a world that, if given the chance, will “startle your heart awake.”
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 4.
Grace Bauer has published six books of poetry, most recently Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems (Backwaters/University of Nebraska Press). She also co-edited the anthology Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her poems, essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals.
Patricia Clark is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars (Terrapin Books, 2020). Her previous book, The Canopy (Terrapin Books, 2017), won the 2018 PSV Book of the Year Award. She taught for many years in the Writing Department at Grand Valley State University in Michigan where she was also the university’s poet in residence.
See all items about Grace Bauer
Visit Grace Bauer’s contributors page.
See all items about Patricia Clark
Visit Patricia Clark’s contributors page.
