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Killarney Clary
BY COMMON SALT

Paper $12.95
(ISBN 0-932440-74-6)

Cloth $22.95
(ISBN 0-932440-73-8)

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Killarney Clary's spare and lucid prose poems reduce the contemporary landscape to its essences and essentials, revealing the ways in which it is broken, unchartable, mysterious, and violent. Her language is unerring, her vision unique.

In this, her second book, she advances into an enlarged command--more musical, more disciplined, more playful, and more concentrated--of her mapping of our lives and psyches.

 

*****

I'm pulled east from Santa Monica toward the beacon of First Interstate; office lights wipe in rain across the glass as I'm fed downward. I steer my own surrender north on the Hollywood, off on Silver Lake Boulevard, up the ravine.

Each street's a wrinkle stretched or strained. No hiding. Laugh lines, scars, life lines and futures, places that haven't been kissed for so long. New cuts open and are filled with those who'll take the least pay. Bundles sigh on warehouse docks on Industrial, indelible.

As I undress, the bright crown of the tower holds with its one red warning over the crest, reminds me there is a center. It sees me, too, as I set the alarm. Magnets draw, repel.

Finally stopped, the night suddenly clear, I can sort planes from stars, cats from sirens. Though I know there cannot be a place for restlessness, I collect all I can feel into passion for the city that takes me, moves me, demands I touch it here.

--Killarney Clary

Copyright c 1996 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.


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