Description
Tom Clark was one of those wonderfully difficult-to-categorize figures who connected several generations of postwar American poetry. A poet, editor, biographer and critic, Clark became poetry editor of The Paris Review while still in his twenties and subsequently published extensively with Black Sparrow Press. His literary orbit included poets of the New York School, Beats and the wider counterculture; he later wrote biographies of Jack Kerouac and Charles Olson. A Short Guide to The High Plains is especially appealing because Clark dedicated it to Ed Dorn, who also contributes the introduction—putting two distinctive American poetic voices between the same covers.
Published by Cadmus Editions in Santa Barbara, A Short Guide to The High Plains is a sequence of short poems and prose poems responding to the stark physical and human landscape of the American West. The colophon states that this first edition was printed in February 1981 by Mackintosh & Young for Cadmus Editions and designed by the great Graham Mackintosh, whose printing and book design are deeply intertwined with postwar West Coast literary publishing. Alongside the trade edition offered here, Cadmus produced 75 numbered copies signed by Clark and 26 lettered copies containing a page of holograph in the poet’s hand. It’s exactly the kind of beautifully made, modest small-press poetry book that tends to slip under the radar—and exactly the sort of book that rewards another look.
A handsome piece of West Coast small-press publishing connecting Tom Clark, Ed Dorn, Graham Mackintosh and the American poetic landscape.
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