DREAMWORKS by James Clarke

Dreamworks (New & Selected Poems) by James Clarke, 133 pages, Exile Editions, 2008.

A couple months ago, it was my good fortune to serendipitously bump into James Clarke at The Human Bean. It had been decades since we last trafficked in poetry with each other -- actually, I was the dealer, he was the consumer. A lot of poetic justice has passed and Mr Clarke has created a moving body of poetic work.

Permanence
(for Amelia)

After the funeral my granddaughter whispered into her
mother’s ear: “I want to be alone with papa,” &
so I took her by the hand, led
her into the living room, thinking
we could have a quiet time together.
She leaned the slight weight
of her four-year-old head against my chest, nestled
in my arms, mute & still & safe &
for the longest while we held each other – our
hearts, two shells resonating in the dark –
the wet, white seconds like lanterns soaking up
the night, her life-breath – a small urgent bell
making me promise over & over I would never leave.

Dreamworks, is a collection of poems heavy on the poignant debris of lost love -- not the run away into adulterous arms loss, nor the bitter-worded walkoff of harrumph-you lose, but the love that submerged into self-loathing and flung itself into the furious foam of Niagara Falls loss.

Susan Musgrave wrote, “Poets and writers, lovers, those who have lost someone they love, anyone who has ever had the feeling that life is not fair will find something to take away with them from this book.”

James Clarke, a retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario, powered to the brain with law, bearing judicial robes heavy with humanity, softens the lethally inexplicable with poetic justice, sentencing sensibility to the ambiguity of ellipse: poetry.

Suicide! Blind side! A mountain of kisses, caresses, strokes, laughter, dinner, lunches, sickness, health, smile … this is not a one-note poet. Other poems emanate liquid irony, for all the flotsam that washed up to the bench of justice where James Clarke earned his money.

James Clarke has come a long way from Monday, August 16, 1965 when, as a Cobourg town councillor, he rose in council chambers and recited,

The problem of glass is very wide,
It would take the council years to decide;
I therefore move with thought profound
That we send it back to Owen Sound.

Owen Sound council had written to Cobourg soliciting support to arrest the practice of soft drink vendors selling their product in containers that litter beaches. Mayor Jack Heenan added that “there were far too many drinking on the beaches and many under legal age.”

Poet Clarke has abandoned those doggerel days of summer and matured into a splendid poet who writes with muscular austerity, strengthening his poetry while adroitly pumping irony for all it’s worth. How else to explain the insouciance of his 2002 book of poetry, entitled, How To Bribe a Judge, with an introduction written by Edward L. Greenspan.

It is described as “A book of poems for justified sinners and reprobates alike, this collection of poetry, written by a Justice of the Ontario Court, offers insights on the act of court room sentencing and explores mercy and tolerance strained by wisdom.

Dreamworks contains selected poems but a tragic thread runs through the anthology. In a violent outrage against life, his wife had suicided over Niagara Falls. This act resonates throughout many of his poems, just as my father’s suicide resonates through my poetry.

Mournful and melancholy do not inhabit his poetry. He affirms the joy of living, when a garden “will be the talk of the beehive” and on another occasion waking “up suddenly -- a nightshift of crickets outside our bedroom window…” and on another occasion, “I step out of my body and break into wings.” In another poem he begins, “to burn out of love / is to break one’s fist / against a star.”

Loss and longing are the silver silk that threads through many of the poems in this collection, but life is exquisitely persistent, as in this more recent poem, Termination.

After meeting with the boss he marched
To his office & dumped all his files into

A metal container. He struck a match.
While staff looked on stunned, flames leaped

Ceilingward, the office billowed with smoke.
He heard the boss, purple with rage, shout:

“Call the fire department,” as sprinkler water
transformed his life’s work to soggy ash.

He danced around the pyre. He’d never felt so giddy
And free. He hoped his body would catch fire.

In the poem, Abracadabra, or, Toward a Definition of Poetry, he shares high tea with a little girl who earnestly wants to know what poetry is. While attempting to do so

A narrow-winged damselfly
with four lacy wings &
long bright red needle
lands on my foot.

“Watch out papa,” she exclaims,
“your big toe’s on fire!”

So there you have it, a definition of poetry as good as any great. Poetry is the fire that Clarke has always wanted to play with. Cobourg would do well to recognize this poet who lived and worked amongst us for so many years before the judiciary perched him on a high bench where he saw the flaws that laws failed to address.

James Clarke is the author of eight books of poetry, all via Exile Editions.