Reveille

Winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize from the University of Arkansas Press

In Reveille a man suffers fits of supernatural coughing, flytraps attack a child, a moray haunts a waterbed, and the prodigal son stalks his local brothel in a costume made from lion-hide. These poems survey their host of holy objects and exotic creatures the way one might the emblems in a dream: curious of their meanings but reluctant to interpret them and simplify their mystery. Theologically playful, rhetorically sophisticated, and formally ambitious, Reveille is rooted in awe and driven by the impulse to praise. At heart, these are love poems, though their loves are varied and complicated by terrible threats: that we will cry out and not be answered, fall asleep and never wake. Against such jeopardy Reveille fixes our attention on a lightening horizon.

Praise for Reveille :

“Here is a sensuous book, a love parade, a blitz of sugar where everything is “swaddled in sun-lust.” Here is a pair of “jaguar pajamas.” Reveille seeks to wake us to the new world we find every morning—familiar somehow, but strange enough to fear. These poems point us to delight. To joy. They seek to guide us “like a compass locked on heaven.” I trust this book. Clark is a poet of exquisite powers and Reveille is a pleasure and a pleasure and a pleasure.”
                    —Steve Scafidi, author of To the Bramble and the Briar

“Reveille is suffused with a fascinating postmodern sense of the sacred. In its elegant hesitations and lovely vacillations, this book stands on the side of revelation and reverence.”
                    —Andrew Hudgins, author of American Rendering: New and Selected Poems

“Wallace Stevens called a poem the ‘cry of its occasion.’ Through all manner of ‘throats’—windpipes, wells, chimneys, kazoos, whistles—the poems in Reveille (<MF re + veiller, to awaken) offer a lucid dreamer’s call to the altar of each moment. These love poems, at once unabashedly, tenderly secular and lavishly sacred (‘because pleasure / is complicated, more so perhaps than suffering’), create out of all manner of cris de coeur (echoes, rumors, stutters, a son’s colicky wailing, a Biblical bout of coughing) a sensuous, ecstatic, formally brilliant music.”
                    —Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New and Selected Poems

“Organized more in symphonic movements than narrative arc, George David Clark’s debut collection Reveille works a kind of hypnosis. In four sections with a reveille to begin each, a landscape—make that soundscape—amasses an impressive array of subjects and tones. . . . And so, if the book is itself a wake-up call, each poem sounding a unique and sonorous note that pulls us deep into the dreamlike world of the poet, when we put the book down we wonder at a world made more vibrant and urgent—even if we also yearn to slip back to something elusive once again.”
                    —Christopher McCurry, in Rain Taxi

“There is repetition in reverence, and reverence in repetition. Clark’s use of meter, rhyme, and repetition—somewhat traditional tactics—is never predictable, never monotonous. Rather, the affect is “sonorous and redolent” of a poetic tradition that Clark intentionally manipulates to create his own brand of music. These claims, this music being written about what it means to be human does not exist in a vacuum, and, the poet seems to imply, neither do we. There is a current underneath all of these poems, propelling them, and us, into a more complete and musical existence.”
                    —Raena Shirali, in The Journal

“Where Clark excells is in the delicate commingling of the domestic and divine, and, as the book progresses, the suburban and surreal. From pythons in grand pianos to pachyderms on parade, we never quite know when or if our dream has ended. This climaxes in the strange and unforgettable ‘Whatever Burn This Be,’ in which a coughing fit that never stops becomes a kind of quasi-psalm: ‘angled properly the noise he made // this ultimate ugliness could strike the ears / of paradise in a way no prayer could hope to.'”
                    —Michael Lavers, in Quarterly West

“Imagery that is biblically influenced, painterly-produced, and sublime floods these slow-paced and careful poems…. The language is sensual, the lines gingerly lengthened, building up the dream and moving back and forth between the spiritual and the spiritual turned down-to-earth.
                    —Dorothy Chan, in Hayden’s Ferry Review

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Selected Poems from Reveille Available Online:

“Jellyfish” at Verse Daily, originally in Southern Poetry Review

“Cigarettes” at How a Poem Happens, originally in The Yale Review

“Heimlich for a Heavenly Windpipe” at Verse Daily, originally in Field

“Lullaby with Bourbon” at Verse Daily, originally in The Greensboro Review

“Python in a Grand Piano” in Narrative

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