Lifesaving Lines: You are not alone, by Thomas A. Clark

Dear Thomas A. Clark

I won’t lie, until recently I hadn’t heard of you. (We could talk for a long time about this. All I would ask is that you don’t take it personally. I have started to live my life attempting to accept that it’s hopeless to keep up with everything. It really isn’t personal. As I said to Helena Nelson once, I’m not even well-known in my own family.) But, following my nose one morning (is there any other way?), suddenly there you were, in a roundup review of recent poetry in the Guardian, along with Ursula K. Le Guin, Sophie Dumont and Shrikant Verma.

Blah blah blah went the (very well written) review until bang there you were coming alive in your own words (I do like a review that quotes the actual poems): ‘be one who / when the lightest breeze / thrills through you / takes note’ and then ‘a part of you on the rocks / a part of you in bog cotton / a part of you snagged on wire / a part of you unravelling’ and I felt something in me shift, a small but deeply profound intake of breath, somewhere between the words oh and wow. I can only describe it as an embodied moment. We (I, everyone) overuse the word visceral now, don’t we, but that’s where I felt it, in my good old Roman viscera. I knew I had to find more.

A quick spot of googling later and that’s what happened, a whole page of you at the Scottish Poetry Library no less, in a navy sweater (I have one too!) in front of the obligatory bookshelf, not looking at the camera (I’m with you on that), with a full biog at the foot of which an injunction to ‘Read the poems’. Which I did. Drank them, more like, gulping, swallowed them whole, not even touching the sides. At which point I started again.

I got lucky. I hit gold pretty much instantly with ‘in the half-light of dusk’. I read it again. Then again. The fourth (or twenty-fourth?) time noticing it was a sonnet. Much more importantly, I noticed what it was doing to me, that bodily reaction again, gooseflesh all over, the best kind of cold shower waking me from the sleep of being comfortable with not noticing the world around me. I knew very profoundly that this was a music and a way of looking that I needed to grab hold of as much as possible right that instant: ‘if you are alone at the edge/ of shadows you are not alone’. Oh. Wow. And again, wow. Not just how did he do that, but thank you for speaking into my life. You are not alone. I am not alone. Words an eight-year-old could understand – and then ponder for a lifetime. Words I needed (need) to hear. I am still recovering (I may never, fully, who can tell?). What else can I tell you? You weren’t there. Then you were there, your words, just when I needed them. Thank you. Wow.

With thanks and good wishes

Anthony