Patricia Clark

Patricia Clark is the author of six volumes of poetry, including The Canopy and, before that, Sunday Rising. She has also published three chapbooks: Deadlifts (New Michigan Press), Wreath for the Red Admiral and Given the Trees. Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and has appeared in The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Slate, and Stand. She was a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has completed residencies at The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Tyrone Guthrie Center (in County Monaghan (Ireland), and the Ragdale Colony. Awards for her work include a Creative Artist Grant in Michigan, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize, and co-winner of the Lucille Medwick Prize from the Poetry Society of America. From 2005-2007 she was honored to serve as the poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan. She was Poet-in-Residence and Professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan where she worked for thirty years.

Patricia's book The Canopy received the Poetry Society of Virginia's book award for 2018 and she gave a reading at their poetry festival on May 5, 2018 in Williamsburg, VA.

***If you order Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars and wish you could have a signed copy, email Patricia at patriciapoet@gmail.com and she will mail you a signed bookplate to place in your book. It's a great substitute! No extra charge!

See the link above (in red) to order Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars from Amazon.com 

If ot Amazon, I highly recommend calling/finding your local bookseller and ordering the book directly from them. In Grand Rapids, MI I recommend Books & Mortar, 966 Cherry St. SE, telephone (616) 214-8233.

Patricia Clark's poems immerse the reader in the living world through the quality of her attention and appreciation. And she includes us humans with wit and wisdom. In Les Rochers de Belle-Ile, she writes: Both the sea and the rocks/ show age/ It's a tired scene of their/ coming together...No escaping how the sea/ throws you repeatedly on the rocks/ of all you're stupid about. There's hard-won intelligence here. We see it in people sharing a meal and being especially kind to each other after a suicide: lots of please and thanks/ as we handed food around/ basket of steaming bread/for buttering. Always, there is a deep understanding of our interconnections, as in this lovely and evocative final stanza of "Near the Tea House at Meijer Japanese Garden," now tracing a pale blue vein/ under the skin like a leaf's midrib. We would do well to take Patricia Clark's guidance: The charge: note what is here, what departs.

 --Ellen Bass, author of Indigo --

There is an unmistakable ardor for sentience in the gentle, exactingly poised voice of this book, its lyrically charged strophes demanding attention not only to its graceful syntax, but also to its halting apprehension of tiny bits of this world—the clap of a bamboo bell spilling its water on stone in a Japanese garden, the purple rib bone at the underside of a maple leaf, the human ashes that rush in a river to the sea. I am reminded of Chopin's Nocturnes; each poem finely wrought as an exquisite music that is elegiac, valedictory, and yet absent of mourning. This is an astonishing book.

— Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road --

Patricia Clark's new book of poems, Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars, like its title is a knowing mash-up, full of her usual wide-ranging brilliance and sly wit, at times playful, accessible in the best possible way. It's a monk's travelogue, a scholar's giddy after-party. Exquisitely rendered, these poems, for all their beauty and mastery of tone and rhythm, their sprezzatura, are, to use another image, like cairns poised in a landscape, somehow at once delicate and durable, by turns landmarks, monuments, and tombstones, before which the traveler will pause in wonder before moving on, yet carrying with her their memory, as sustenance – each a fresh testament to that most marvelous of human traits, our limitless human capacity for invention, and the necessity of witness. Whoever, wherever you are, find this book. I promise, you'll be astonished, and nourished, mile after mile.

--Daniel Lawless, editor Plume magazine --