Congratulations to Robert Clinton!
Marsh Hawk Press is delighted to share that Circling Rivers will be publishing Robert Clinton’s forthcoming collection, WASTELAND HONEY, in Fall 2021. Robert was a finalist in the Marsh Hawk Press 2021 summer poetry book competition. More information is available at https://circlingrivers.com/books-clinton-wasteland-honey/ but we’re happy to share the following:
Says poet Michael Ryan (Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize): “Robert Frost wrote, ‘If it’s a wild tune, it’s a poem.’ Robert Clinton’s WASTELAND HONEY is loaded with wild tunes. These poems, tightly and gracefully and elegantly written, make me think of the great jazz pianist Bill Evans: his riffs are essential to the presentation of the song, which is always there.”
WASTELAND HONEY: POEMS offers to us the living and dying world with which we contend—or to which we surrender. Robert Clinton speaks of the devils who rob the earth, but he makes a place in his verse for the “rose-clean, vigorous, fragrant.” Contrasting tempers and riddling parables are framed by rhythms and fluency of diction that achieve a unique formal structure for each poem. WASTELAND HONEY‘s arresting and eccentric metaphors linger, like the burning touch of a thistle.
More praise:
Clinton’s language bears the stamp of pure poetry: well-wrought syntax, sudden juxtapositions, and especially a compelling musicality. These poems read as if hurtled into being by a mysterious and wondrous energy.
—Nance Van Winckel, The Many Beds of Martha Washington
“Delicious paradoxes are the very texture of Robert Clinton’s refreshing and consistently surprising WASTELAND HONEY, just as paradox and self-contradiction are all too often the texture of our oxymoronic lives. Like his “venomous anemones,” Clinton’s poems stimulate our taste buds while they unfailingly—even ruthlessly—keep our minds and hearts both off balance and alert.”
—Lloyd Schwartz (Pulitzer Prize in Criticism)
With grateful nods to his biblical rhythms and fables, we enter Robert Clinton’s new collection. The speaker is in keen touch with the outdoors, both its hardships and its balm. WASTELAND HONEY is well worthy of repeated readings.
—Sarah Gorham, Alpine Apprentice and Study in Perfect
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Robert Clinton, born and raised in upstate New York, has an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College, and has twice been a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. His poetry collection Taking Eden was published by Sarabande Books, and his poems have appeared in Wisconsin Review, Decomp, Antioch Review, Stand, Plume and The Atlantic, among other journals.
