Scan barcode
A review by zebglendower
The Clerk's Tale by Spencer Reece
4.0
A meticulously crafted, often moving collection from Spencer Reece (his first, actually). The poems are shot through with absence and loss and often read as fractured. Sometimes that effect left me feeling alienated from the poem, but sometimes it was heartrending, as in the poem "Interlude":
We are two men on a park bench
in Palm Beach oblivious to the two men
who start their truck with that boy
from the bar inside dragging him
in the dark to the fence strapping him
with a rope to a post in Laramie,
Wyoming, where he freezes and dies
over five days. My dear, it is late.
The Flagler Museum is shut.
Stay with me. Remain here with me.
This collection doesn't exude the sort of wonder at the beauty and brokenness of life that Reece's second collection does, and for that reason I didn't LOVE it, but I know I'll return to many of its poems again.
We are two men on a park bench
in Palm Beach oblivious to the two men
who start their truck with that boy
from the bar inside dragging him
in the dark to the fence strapping him
with a rope to a post in Laramie,
Wyoming, where he freezes and dies
over five days. My dear, it is late.
The Flagler Museum is shut.
Stay with me. Remain here with me.
This collection doesn't exude the sort of wonder at the beauty and brokenness of life that Reece's second collection does, and for that reason I didn't LOVE it, but I know I'll return to many of its poems again.