Sleepwalker's Fate: New and Selected Poems, 1965-1991

Published to mark the poet's fiftieth birthday, this is a landmark book in Tom Clark's oeuvre: a selection from his first quarter century of writing, from songs of innocence published when he was twenty-five ("Lake Life, I want to take a bath/ In you and forget death") to lines reflecting the disappointments and compromises of middle age ("While everything external/ dies away in the far off/ echo of the soul/ still there's a mill wheel turning/ . . . / by some distant stream/ a note of peace/ in a life which/ will never be peaceful").

The book is divided into two parts: the generous "New Poems, 1986 1991," which collects recent lyrics mourning the passing of time, the trials of insomnia, the sad politics of poetry, and the sadder poetry of politics; and "Dark Continent, 1965 1986," Clark's judicious winnowing of his earlier work (on love, baseball, classicism, jazz, physics, trout kills, popular culture, and Catholic-Zen-antinomian mysticism). Between the two comes a ferocious prose poem, "Diary of Desert War, 1990-1991," an account of the first Bush's Middle East war written in the terse, telegraphic style of the Times Square news zipper - that is, of a news zipper in the hands of a surrealist op-ed poet.