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.
Thomas A Clark lives in a fishing village on the east coast of Scotland. With the artist Laurie Clark he runs Cairn Gallery, a space for minimal and conceptual art. In exploration of some formal possibilities of poetry, his work often appears as installations or interventions in galleries or in domestic or public spaces. Publications include 'Tormentil & Bleached Bones' (Polygon, 1993), 'Distance & Proximity' (Pocketbooks, 2000), 'The Path to the Sea' (Arc, 2005), 'The Hundred Thousand Places' (Carcanet, 2008), and 'Yellow & Blue' (Carcanet, 2014). Numerous small cards, books and prints from his own Moschatel Press explore presentation as an aspect of form.
Title: Farm by the Shore
Author: Thomas A. Clark
ISBN: 9781784103521
Binding:
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Publication Date: 2017-07-07
Number of Pages: 104
Weight: 0.1400 kg
'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