Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud

The unassuming elegance of Clary's 1989 debut, Who Whispered Near Me, with its melodic sentences, inward wisdom, and mysterious scene shifts, quietly changed the face of the American prose poem, though she gets too little credit. Her fourth book of prose poems may change that%E2%80%94it's her most consistent, and maybe her best. It's also her saddest, since half the musings, memories, and meditations here face the debility, old age, and death of her parents: "That lack is a lack forever. There was pure color in the open, a yellow iris in the rain." Other poems, however, look to the future as well as the past, to erotic attraction and to grown-up commitments, and to sites in Ireland or the West Coast. Some pieces are essentially flash fiction, about loneliness, about parents and children: "She taped a note for me on her window, and I one in return: she answered%E2%80%A6 I see through the glass the glare on ornaments." Clary may be "alone in the cold wishing I weren't alone," but she is also keeping her promises, to other people and to the music in her American language, where "what I learn catches on what I already know." It's easy to imagine more attention coming at last to this already-cherished writer. (Oct.)