A Review of Newly Not Eternal by George David Clark

By Steven Searcy

George David Clark, Newly Not Eternal. LSU Press, 2024.

Review by Steven Searcy

George David Clark’s second collection, Newly Not Eternal, is a book of short lyric poems centered around themes of time, mortality, and eternity. A significant majority are traditional sonnets and nearly all use some type of rhyme and meter. Based on that 30,000-foot abstract, one might be forgiven for thinking this is a book that conservatively retreads old terrain. Instead, it’s a testament to Clark’s poetic strengths that despite the familiar themes and forms, this collection is memorable, compelling, and original. The central event that anchors the work is the tragic loss of Clark’s son, Henry, who died in childbirth, while his identical twin Peter survived. At the heart of the book is a half-crown of sonnets dedicated to this lost son, and the collection as a whole explores the tensions in the beauty and burden of our brief, time-bound lives.

Clark has gained some notoriety as editor-in-chief of the journal 32 Poems and as an accomplished poet in his own right (his first collection, Reveille, won the 2015 Miller Williams Poetry Prize). Although his previous work was predominantly in free verse, this book makes a turn to nearly all formal verse. Clark uses form as scaffolding to help guide these poems, but the formal elements are handled lightly, in service of the rhythm and music of the language.

While most of the poems rely on consistent rhyme and meter, and clearly sound as such when read aloud, they are mainly typeset as small groups of slender lines that direct the reader’s attention away from the more conventional formal aspects. In this sense, these poems could be said to probe the relationship between poetry as a spoken act versus an artifact on the page.

Two-thirds of the book’s poems are sonnets, but none of them are presented as fourteen lines; instead, each pentameter line is broken into two or three short lines on the page, with various types of indents and stanza breaks. (A discussion of various antecedents for this type of lineation can be found in a 2017 essay by Stephen Kampa from Literary Matters: “Another Way of Breaking the Pentameter.”) Occasionally this evokes the style of Kay Ryan, as in Clark’s “Still Life,” where the words that sound like end rhymes are hidden internally through the use of short lines with irregular line breaks. However, Clark is generally not attempting to hide the rhyme and meter because in most cases the end rhymes of the broken pentameter lines still come at the end of each couplet or tercet. The intention, as stated in an interview with Timothy Green, is “to take some pressure off the end rhymes” and lend more weight to the internal rhymes. This approach works well because the end rhymes are often assonantal slant rhymes and there are a plethora of internal rhymes and other kinds of sonic richness besides rhyme. Consider this poem:

          Song of the Imaginary Friend

          Give me
          your gall. Give me
          an ugly name,

          the fabric
          body of a tragic
          doll,

          yarn-haired,
          bug-eyed, plain.
          I’ll take the blame.

         I’ll think the thoughts
         you shouldn’t
         claim, the bald

         abuse and aimless
         libel—
         I’m the cloth

         and Lysol
         used to disinfect
         a brain.

         Give me
         your stains and sweat,
         your small wet cough

         against my neck,
         your spit,
         your kiss’s mange.

         I’ll nip back soft:
         my lips
         a waft of light

         against your jaw
         while you’re asleep.
         I’ll bare

         my teeth,
         but barely. Where
         a parasite

         might gnaw,
         might thieve, I only
         want my share

         of why
         you’re lonely, Mother,
         God. My bite

         is fair. Give me
         the grief
         to which I’m heir.

In addition to the finely crafted mosaic of sounds to be explored and enjoyed, the very short lines and wider spacing tend to slow the pace, allowing the reader or listener to savor the aural abundance and ruminate on the polyvalent meanings. (For another excellent example, check out Elijah Blumov’s in-depth analysis of “Shiversong” on the Versecraft podcast.)

If any complaint might be lodged with the book, it could be the dominance of the sonnet form, though Clark attempts to balance the many sonnets with other meters and forms: there are a few anapestic poems, one longer free-verse-adjacent piece with loose three-beat lines, and nonce forms like the fascinatingly unique “Sun On Your Shoulders.” Ultimately, Clark does not seem interested in the forms themselves, rather using them as a vehicle for the music. On the whole, he is highly successful at weaving strands of words with meter and rhyme to cast sonic spells, in order to approach foundational questions about the nature of existence. The work is by turns gorgeous, haunting, and playful, without being the least bit simple or light.

Quite a few pieces have the word “song” in the title, and this collection is nothing if not musical. These poems are not intended to represent everyday speech, but stand apart as ornately assembled miniatures packed with layers of meaning. What else is poetry but human language elevated to its highest and most potent manifestations? Even when the subject matter appears slight—an eyelash, a mosquito—the lines are always dense with lush sounds and subtle brushes into the mysteries of life.

Clark is exceedingly virtuosic and clever, and at times the verbal dexterity and formal skill can be almost overwhelming. He manages to convincingly pull off feats like a monorhymed sonnet (“Black Light”) and a backwards abecedarian (“Afterhere”). But the extravagant language and potentially intimidating poetic chops are generally offered in service of mining deep truths and are tempered by the humility and honesty that Clark brings to the work, reflecting the experience of life in a world that is often cruel and inscrutable yet also astonishingly intricate and beautiful.

The titular phrase “newly not eternal” comes from “The First Supper,” which tenderly describes a newborn’s first nursing session, receiving “the sweet colostrum / like a spurt of fresh / infinity injected / into time.” Much of this work will resonate particularly with parents, as Clark writes from his experience as a father to young children. One such moving poem is “Poltergeists,” which begins with the mysterious and vexing antics of household ghosts but ends as a sort of distant cousin to Longfellow’s classic “The Children’s Hour.” The dimeter quatrains are deftly cross-rhymed until the final lines, where the sudden breakdown in the established rhyme scheme brilliantly reinforces the meaning of the poem:

          Tonight the squalid

          den is evidence
          that they've been busy:
          one's dispensed
          the box of Disney

          heroines
          across my chair.
          The genuine
          girl-ghost is there

          herself, and stands
          against the wall.
          She hides her hand
          and one last doll

          behind the sheer,
          white drapes. She wants
          to disappear.
          Her father haunts

          this room. He'll chide
          her and then fade
          his head inside
          the books displayed

          on shelves out of her
          reach. Or perhaps
          he'll call her brother,
          move both ghouls

          out of place:
          into his lap
          until the rules
          have been erased.

The collection’s most personal poems are the half-crown of sonnets about Clark’s lost son, Henry. This “Ultrasound” sequence is placed in the book’s second section, but additional poems are interspersed after every one or two from the half-crown. While these inserted pieces are in conversation at some level with the “Ultrasound” poems, it’s not clear that this strategy of breaking up the sequence is entirely effective. The seven linked sonnets comprise a cohesive unit and might have been better set apart as an independent section. Still, the ordering within a collection of lyric verse is always somewhat arbitrary and the individual poems don’t suffer from their placement. Many of these sonnets have closing turns that are remarkably affecting, even with multiple readings—heartbreakingly vulnerable in their expressions of grief. Here is the first in the sequence:

          Ultrasound: Your Picture

          Henry Thomas Clark, 10/7/14

          We’ve framed an ultrasound
                      of you and Peter

          holding hands
                      (or almost) in the womb,

          your moon-bright arms
                      crossed in a black balloon

          with week, and weights,
                      and heights in millimeters

          penciled on the side.
                      We say it’s good

         that he, at least, was with you
                      when you died,

          that unlike us
                      you’ll never know the why

          of being lonely
                      or what naked falsehood

          feels like in one’s mind.
                      You see, it’s false
                                                                                               
         to say your death
                      was somehow grace. It’s grace

          that spared Cain’s life
                      and later gave Eve other                                             

          sons, despite creation’s
                     wastes and faults.

          I wish you could have known
                      love’s aftertastes.

          I wish you’d had a chance
                      to hate your brother.

The entire collection contains many Biblical allusions, as in the above, which invokes Genesis 4 in a disarmingly powerful way. Threaded throughout this work is an interrogation of God’s sovereignty when confronted with the world’s torrent of pain and death. We are far from Eden, faced with “howling whims” within the “blighted garden,” and so often the divine can seem vindictive or aloof to our plight. “God Jokes” takes this topic head-on, closing with the shattering lines: “We weep at His embrace / and strain to hear / Him crying while He laughs.” These poems probe and seethe and mourn without presenting any clean resolutions to the difficult theological issues, though we find hints of a tender love behind the frowning providence.

Clark’s poems invite the reader to honestly ask hard questions, grapple with the apparent silence, and wait for whispers of an answer. There is mercy and hope on offer, even to those of us who, “so rushed through time, / stay numb to grace.” While Clark pulls no punches in expressing the frailty and futility of our earthly existence, there is also a strong current of joy running through the work, in small moments of beauty and hope for life beyond our inescapable mortality. In the backwards abecedarian, “Death’s clichés” do not get the final say—the last word is “alleluias.”

Newly Not Eternal does what great poetry ought to do: it vividly depicts the reality of life, addresses the most significant questions, and helps us to feel genuine human emotions, through the arrangement of sounds that are rhythmic, intricate, fresh, and enchanting. This book rewards slow, repeated readings and deserves to sit among the finest contemporary poetry collections.

Steven Searcy is the author of Below the Brightness (Solum Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Commonweal, The Windhover, UCity Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and four sons in Georgia.

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Online resources to read or hear some of the poems from the book:

Reading and Interview on Rattlecast Ep. 231 with Timothy Green:

(Clark’s portion starts at ~7:30)

Reading at Loganberry Books with Ryan Wilson and Matthew Buckley Smith, hosted by Elijah Blumov:

(Clark’s portion starts at ~5:30)

“Shiversong” featured on the Versecraft podcast by Elijah Blumov:

“The Latch” in Literary Matters

“Kaleidoscope” in The Cortland Review

“Washing Your Feet” via Verse Daily, originally in Ecotone

“Sun on Your Shoulders” in Rattle

“Still Life” in Thrush Poetry Journal

“Poltergeists” via Verse Daily, originally in Birmingham Poetry Review