Perhaps one of the only books of poetry in the 90's that just goes ahead and says what it has to say.

From the moment survivors of Captain Cook's third voyage of discovery found that sea otter skins procured from Northwest Coast Indians would bring $100 apiece on the Chinese market, the future of the coast, the Indians, and the sea otters was irrevocably altered. Tom Clark's serial poetic history of the maritime fur trade (1785-1810) documents and elaborates that change, linking white world fur traders with indigenes in extended metaphors of contact and confrontation. Distilling fact from decisive instance to yield an elegiac narrative of the original encounter, the poems develop implications that bring the story into current perspectives, engaging ethnology, ecology, Indian cultural and mythic history, geography, European and American civilized' (white world) vs. primitive' ways of thinking. No doubt about it, writes Western poet and historian Edward Dorn, Empire of Skin is one of the great books of recent decades. The Cook sequences particularly are vivid and precisely measured and bring the record of the amazing venality of the Northwest coast to life. It's the greatest work on the fur trade since Colonel Chittenden.

This is a complete revision of Clark's bestseller "Designing Storage Area Networks." The new book provides guidelines for implementing SANs to solve existing networking problems in large-scale corporate networks.

The hero of this American gothic nightmare comedy is a messianic hillbilly prophet whose onetime local glory as a high school football star gives way to a career of outlaw questing. With the mysterious disappearance of his main squeeze--an edgy, spooky honkytonk chanteuse--that quest becomes increasingly deviant and deranged. The landscape through which the earnest, confused seeker chivvies his banged-up black pickup truck is a magical and timeless one, its dense woods and dark lakes charged with a heavy burden of industrially-produced hexes, curses and toxic spells. Mechanical animals and changeling species, subjected to continual torments of re-programming, run half wild through a menacing backwater of poisonous tarns, vicious factories and slimy swamps. Elders of strange religions exercise insidious, unpleasant influences, while witches in Secret Shacks broadcast bad vibrations that produce genetic alterations. In this mutated vision of reality, there is a general spell under which everybody is bound. The Spell: A Romance is a haunting and funny poetic novel about the survival of medieval chivalric codes--and their dangerous implications--in a toxic-shocked modern world. It is also a tale of love and quest, betrayal and revenge. The mysterious protean voice of the book slips back and forth from comic narrative prose to spare lyrical poetry as it becomes the voice of legend: allusive, expansive, suspending disbelief.

Poetry. Illustrations. Tom Clark, author of the novel HEARTBREAK HOTEL, expands upon his poetic foundation with COLD SPRING, a collection of ink drawings and chronologically arranged poems whose bare phrases conjure vivid images even in their simplicity. It is a poetic diary of sorts which chronicles the events of a month, and Clark's impressions of quotidian life are drawn and written with a keen sense of detail, perfectly capturing winter's dark allure.

Essential for all readers of progressive American poetry, this collection encompasses the exhilaration and joy, the madness and sorrow of the last forty years with a lyric intensity that, in the words of the poet Robert Creeley, offers a "wry and securing truth." A generous selection from the poet's career, Light and Shade is a major release from one of the country's most influential poets and critics.

Analytische annotatie: Gedichten.