Acting hard but speaking softly

George David Clark’s newest poetry collection grapples with death

George David Clark’s second full collection of poetry, “Newly Not Eternal,” grapples with God and mortality, and covers this ground with an impressive array of poetic styles. Clark, a professor of English at Washington & Jefferson College south of Pittsburgh, also serves as the editor of “32 Poems,” an international poetry journal. The journal is dedicated to shorter poems, and Clark upholds this aesthetic here, with poems packing a strong punch in often strikingly precise language.

The book opens with “Mosquito,” a brief religious ode to death and evolution. The poet stipulates that “God… / strapped a dirty needle to the fly” and was acting “hard but speaking softly / when He told us we should die.” The rhyming here, and tautness of expression, foretell the lush and concise musicality that permeate these poems.

“Song of the Genie,” one of several persona poems, bursts with musical rhythm. The genie sings: “I beautify. I muscle up. / I thin. / I pheromone. / I woo. I violin / the mood.” Our bad decisions and wishes, the genie says, could perhaps all be undone: “At last I’d grant you you, / but you decline.” The poet, through the genie, implies that the final wish could, or even should, be to be ourselves.

A Guardian Angel and an Imaginary Friend also have “Songs,” and in the latter, the friendly creature longs for something more real, begging the child to “Give me / your stains and sweat, / your small wet cough.” Ultimately, the imaginary friend wants something very sad and human: “Give me / the grief / to which I’m heir.”

Clark expresses his own grief in a central sequence, a crown of sonnets devoted to Henry Thomas Clark, his child who died before birth in 2014. Henry was a twin of Peter, and in the first of the seven sonnets, “Ultrasound: Your Picture,” the poet says that “it’s good … at least … // that unlike us / you’ll never know the why // of being lonely,” and closes the poem with “I wish you’d had a chance / to hate your brother.” The mourning here emphasizes all aspects of life, how the highs and lows, joys and sorrows, mingle together.

In “Ultrasound: Your Urn,” Clark compares “Pete’s teething” and “cracker crumbs” to Henry, “the tame and quiet twin, // … who never cries or fights, / or takes a breath.” The rhymes are loose, but resonate, perhaps even more so because Clark modifies the sonnets with line breaks, creating 28 short lines to represent the normal 14.

In a crown of sonnets, the last line of the last sonnet repeats the first line of the first sonnet. That line is modified too; it begins in the first as “We’ve framed an ultrasound…” and ends in the seventh as “We framed the ultrasound / of you and Peter.” The phrases provide perfect bookends for the memorializing tone of the sequence. And the changes of tense and article in this line from the first to last sonnet add depth, showing a movement in time that their lost child could not have, and that the poet and his family had to endure.

In a reading, Clark explained that “The First Supper,” the first line of which is the book’s title, describes the birth of a son three years after Henry’s death. The newborn is immediately at his wife’s breast, “the sweet colostrum / like a spurt of fresh / infinity injected / into time.” Our finitude does not deny us such fresh spurts.

This sense of survival, or even joy, mingled with suffering shows up also in “Washing Your Feet” — the stranger whose feet are “dirty” and “bloody,” is both “no one” and “special” to the washer. At the end, the washer personally addresses the washee: “[you] leave / before you’re even dried, / the paths bathed off / revealing paths inside.” The Christian holy act, and emphasis on interiority and redemption, evoke St. Augustine, who wrote in his “Confessions”: “Time takes no holiday. It does not toll idly, but through our senses works its own wonders in the mind.”

Michael Lavers, writing of George David Clark’s first book “Reveille,” praised the “delicate commingling of the domestic and divine … the suburban and surreal.” The poet continues that in “Newly Not Eternal.” His language is sometimes languid, sometimes propulsive, but always rhythmic and melodic.

There are love poems and reflections on his children’s use of language also. But the second poem in the collection, “A Few Keys,” which describes fiddling through a key ring, serves as something of an “Ars Poetica.” Eight lines in the middle foreshadow the full-bodied finesse of all that is to come: “But you can’t coax a mind / with an order / or force belief / loose with a fact. / When I’ve turned, it’s the teeth / in a bittersweet song, / their diligent / baffle and scratch.”

The poet, here talking about a key, ultimately uses his own formal and musical diligence to leave us beatifically baffled about many bittersweet things — and scratching for more.