Salt Flung into the Sky

Ross Clark

Ginninderra Press, Charnwood ACT, 2007

My Craft of Words: an Essay

Into this ark the syllables come one by one
and their congress invents grunt howl
and dawn chorus, chatter and shriek and
how to count the stars beyond the compass

of digits. My craft of words is clinker build,
Signatures overlapped and slubbed together,
a shingled un-roof to keep the water out,
a keel and bow of spine and spine and spine

...I can see the stars
to steer by, reach up and dip an unflying
feather and copperplate a log as if i knew
anything, as if I expected to return to port alive,
to my berth, as if others could follow: My craft
of words just kindling on the ocean, this cabin
a coffin
I think, mine own memorial.

Reviewer: Liz Huf

As Frank Pool notes on the back cover, Ross Clark is a broad shouldered "Auden of the Antipodes, a craftsman of ambiguity, allusion, prosody, and music". He reveals himself as a confessional poet, devoted to memories, celebrating his lineage, his history, "struggling against death with all the strength of his art and especially of his love."

"Not death but the shadow of death approaching is what returns us to childhood" he says at the beginning p17. There is something very 'audenish' or perhaps it's a breath of Ulysses in this poem about the 'craft' of writing - and the sea.

Ross too has published in many Australian journals. Blue Dog, Catalyst, Social Alternatives, Journal of Australian Studies, Idiom 23, and much more. His work is aired in readings, performances, note anthologies, and an "unnamed poetry group in Brisbane" as he grapples with death, and the meaning of life.