Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World

Immediately striking about the poems in Clay’s second book is their lack of self-consciousness. The poet’s voice welcomes the reader’s relaxed engagement with an intimacy that it is neither performing nor aiming to please: “I did not even know/ how to begin speaking/ or even hoping/ for an earthquake/ or even hoping and/ knowing I might/ find out what I was supposed to say.” The experiment of the collection lies not in linguistic innovation nor in visual arrangement but in the poet’s constantly turning logic and syntax. Tracing subtle distinctions and modulations in the movement of his thinking, Clay resists conventional narrative, specificities of time and location, and easy resolution. These poems engage fully the natural world—“light reflected back at the sun,” “the wind/ that changes the landscape,”—even as they understand the individual’s exclusion from it: “nature still acts/ as though it does not see you.” And they seek out reflections of self in nature’s mirror even as they acknowledge them as projections of mind: “Don’t think you can see your face in every single cloud.” This poet locates himself at the borders between nature and language, solitude and community, the physical and metaphysical where paradox and fragmentation are at once evaded and embraced. (Apr.)