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The coffee table nude on the cover of Clark’s first collection (a PBS recommendation) seems fully-clothed in her nakedness giving an impression of strength in self-containedness. This image appropriately reflects Clark’s voice.

     You might describe Clark’s aesthetic as expressionist by the way that she doesn’t much use the outside world and its objects as referents, but conjures up her own archetypical and symbolic images coloured with highly-idiosyncratic emotion: (from ‘The Consultant’), “conversation screamed around me /drenching me as though in snow.”

     In common with Selima Hill, Clark’s interest lies in disturbing, not merely stimulating the senses, giving experience a mysterious and challenging turn. Her sense of adventure takes her to unexpected places; one moment we are in Hungary, the next Amsterdam or a zoo, a hospital or Blackpool Tower: one minute she writes in the persona of a man, the next as a patient of Freud or a pet rabbit, but I don’t sense any real distinction between these places and voices; the psychological furniture is the same.

     Ideas in her work revolve around the usefulness and meaningfulness of pain. She ploughs bravely through difficult terrain: grief, frigidity, abuse and more, with a strong tactile and kinaesthetic sense that, I must confess, challenges my own more visual orientation and gives me sense of vertigo. From ‘A Lunch Date with My Father’:

As you’re speaking I’m dreaming
of leaning over the pizza
of leaning over the salad
of leaning over to stop with a kiss
the sun crashing through the window
like a lion with huge paws

     And from ‘Zoo’:

... he chased it and threw
his great shoulders at its hooves

bringing it down in a trembling
thump, and I thought the breaking

of freedom was beautiful, I thought
I was discovering truth

in these limbs collapsing,
antlers falling against the sky,

and the snow in shreds
like a man’s blue eye.

Beautiful and exciting though this is, I couldn’t relate wholeheartedly to all of the work. ‘If You’re Interested’, presents half of a telephone conversation. My feeling reading this was similar to my experience of other parts of the book. I felt at times that I shouldn’t be listening and at others that I was being excluded. Clark’s raw, energetic, symbolic expressionism sometimes left me yearning for the ordinary extraordinariness of the real world.