O Lucky Day - by Patricia Clark (Paperback)

About the Book

O Lucky Day explores concerns about family and mortality, silence and loneliness, widening to include losses in the natural world.

Book Synopsis

Patricia Clark's latest poetry collection O Lucky Day explores her concerns about family and mortality, silence and loneliness, widening to include losses in the natural world. These sorrows often emerge along with an exuberance found in the sensual pleasures of taste and touch. Clark trains herself "to disappear, into the shagbark / hickory, the scarred maple, / the viburnum just about to flower." She knows that whatever upheaval we bring to the world, and ourselves, "something was broken, then healed, then / transformed." She advises us to "loaf and ponder," but also to rise with the rustling grasses in lament of environmental degradation, voicing our insistence for reverence of what remains. These lyric poems of intensity and acute detail render the physical world in its tattered glory.

Review Quotes

O Lucky Day by Patricia Clark makes a reader feel luckier in every possible way. The potent pacing of these poems, their gracious attention to sound and flow, and deeply grounded considerations-woods, birds, plants, beloved people-improve the spirit right away. Life feels richer, more available somehow-nearer and dearer in a traumatic time of too many conflicts. We need this wisdom, cheer, and truthful gaze.-Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Grace Notes: Poems about Families

In the poems of Patricia Clark's fine new book, O Lucky Day, the title's enthusiasm is tempered by the knowledge of losses and inflected with subtle surprises of survival. There's a buoyant yet quiet sense of wonder rippling through these poems, "relishing the juice" of living, even as the speaker prepares for what comes next: "how I train myself // to disappear, into . . . / the viburnum just about to flower." Praise for a long marriage, the loss of friends and beloveds, the self-awareness of both vitality and mortality-these comprise the clarifying paradox of O Lucky Day. Particularly moving are elegies for her father and for her mentor, Stanley Plumly, but all along it's the natural world that provides Clark with her richest variety of beauty, fragility, and obstinate song.-David Baker, author of Whale Fall and Swift: New & Selected Poems

From the first poem "Oxygen" and throughout the book, these contemplative poems will breathe new life into your soul. Patricia Clark's poems are rich with metaphors and filled with fresh ways of looking at the everyday. Her poem "What My Father Wished For" shares an honest and moving expression of the meaning of life near the end. The father states, "I've had everything in this life I could have wanted." Beautiful! I highly recommend this new collection by one of Michigan's finest and best known poets.-M.L. Liebler, author of Underneath My American Face: Five Decades of Selected Poetry