Jeremy Clarke, STONE HOURS

 

Angelus

An old wooden chair with three legs | stands on the bypass
Holding a handful of rain | A monument of sky sits
On the water | A cloud comes to the sky | stays for a time
Then | unthinking | strays |
In winter | snow’s
Slow surrender surprises everything |

From British-born British-Canadian poet Jeremy Clarke comes STONE HOURS (Toronto ON: Rufus Books, 2024), a “medieval Book of Hours reimagined in an urban landscape. Although devised in London, the poems, like the crosses in the city’s kerbstones, stand for all that is urban.” I hadn’t heard previously of Clarke, so was intrigued at someone seemingly out of nowhere with a 340 page volume. According to online sources, he is the author of the chapbooks Incidents of Travel (2012) and Common Prayer (2012), and full-length collections Devon Hymns (2010) and Spatiamentum (2014), all published by Toronto publisher Rufus Books, as well as the privately printed illustrated booklet Cathedral (2017) and Bread of Broken Ground (2020), as well as Psalms in the Vulgar Tongue (Turkey: Wounded Wolf Press, 2018). Also, according to Wikipedia, Clarke was Poet in Residence at Eton College from 2010 to 2020. Why have I not previously heard of Jeremy Clarke? As part of his “Requiem,” he offers:

The place where the wind is always. Going

through a pile of bricks for a single precious
stone. One red in all the old brown there

must be. Colour is what the light is simply
taking. The days stream and it would be

summer and everything thriving in the arc
of its decline. Everything in its hunger

for undoing. How a whole place will separate
into parts to become a land of strangers.

It is being said. What is each thing but moving
towards its own counterweight of wild

in the adoration of the always
emptying air. It is for the wind

the rain will make a brown reveal its red.

With opening poem “Angelus,” STONE HOURS (a lovely edition of 350 copies, with pressed gold foil on the cover and flaps) works the format of the medieval Book of Hours across fifteen sections—“Last Dream Before Sleep,” “Tender for the Garden,” “Praise,” “Requiem,” “Night Office,” “Adam’s Lament,” “Bread of Broken Ground,” “Stonelight,” “Common Prayer,” “Breath & Echo,” “The Desire Field,” “Psalms in the Vulgar Tongue,” “Music for Amen,” “Cathedral” and “Seven Words”—of sequential short or expansively long poems composed as fragments, prayers, narrative stretches, moments and meditations. The poems dig deep into such small, important moments, ones that, at times, I wonder if there might ever be a way out. “And I am here,” he writes, near the end of the third section/hour, “Praise,” “in a place beyond desire or fear. / Lying watching the day / turning inside out, // pulling out the night / until it has filled the room.”

Poets have long been engaged with compositions around time—I could mention recent examples including Stefania Heim’s Hour Book (Ahsahta Press, 2019) [see my review of such here] or Brenda Coultas’ The Writing of an Hour (Wesleyan University Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]—but the “Book of Hours” is obviously a very specific kind of liturgical meditation, engaged more specifically over the years by poets such as bpNichol, as part of his multiple-volume long poem, The Martyrology, or Cole Swensen, who wrote around a fifteenth-century book of hours, the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, through her Such Rich Hour (University of Iowa, 2001). For Clarke, there isn’t the experimental push of language that some of those other examples might have employed, as he instead deliberately examines the structure of those hours, those prayers and meditations, and moves across a narrative trajectory simultaneously timeless, ongoing and sequentially regulated. He takes a medieval form down to its roots, adding a fresh perspective across old knowledge, unfurling his lyric across such ancient bones. As Robert Kroetsch offered via his stone hammer, when a rock becomes tool it becomes stone, and Jeremy Clarke provides. As in the poem-section “A Mass,” as he writes:

Under weeds, tipped waste. Old lumber, blown litter. What the light
is reaching with diamonds. How a day is broken and distributed. Even
as an hour falls in a vacant country bearing the responsibility of being
without utility. Still, each item intricate as a fingerprint in the desert
of everything taken by surprise.