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04/2007. 88 pages.
0896726053
978-0-89672-605-5

The Clearing

By Philip White
Introduction by Robert A. Fink

“How moving it is to find a book so haunted by tragedy and death that is, in addition, soberly life-affirming. A clearing is an empty space, but it is also a habit of mind, an act of clarification. Philip White knows pain’s truths, the most awful of which is that the dead don’t come back. After such knowledge, he then recognizes that ‘mind-changing sorrow dribbles away.’ His poems record irreplaceable loss, and they also represent one man’s resilience and his ability to feel and love again. The Clearing is a very promising debut.”—Willard Spiegelman

“Philip White’s remarkable sequence conveys with great force the emptying of self and world through the loss of a sustaining love, and the grim, gradual outliving of that state. Though anything but metronomic, his poems have a versatile formal strength, and can, for instance, make use at moments of the sonnet’s structure. Even when confronting a world void of meaning, White has an admirable descriptive power, and nothing could be more vivid than these graveside lines from ‘East Lawn’:

First the flowers were thrown,
then the earth. I remember the rich incremental
dark by shovelful smothering their flaming colors
like a cloudbank slowly blotting out stars."

—Richard Wilbur

Philip White’s poems have won a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in the New Republic, Slate, Hudson Review, Southern Review, New England Review, Antioch Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He teaches Shakespeare and early English literature at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.

Awake early, walking, a man looks up
at a crow in flight, notes for the first time
the exact but minutely adaptive arc
the shouldering wings describe. He feels it
in his arms, the strain, the oaring stride,
his chest a prow dividing the warm
morning air. Around, shops opening, noise
of trucks and cars. How long has the man
been out walking? How many years,
for unchangeable reasons? Then one morning
a crow picks across a colorless sky
and he understands. Nothing is given.
The man also must choose how to turn
his head, what to look at, where to land.