Circle Back by Adam Clay
Milkweed Editions, March 2024, $16
Like his last name, Adam Clay’s fifth book of poetry, entitled Circle Back, is deeply rooted in soil horizons and opulent Earth tones. Poems formed from the decomposition of rock and dirt, then brought to life on the poet’s wheel. Clay invites us into his melodic wilderness—both underfoot and the wilderness within. A deeply imaginative lyrical introspection via open-air vignettes of light, nature, birds, water, and a gentle blurring of time.
“We stay anchored to the world / long enough to hold back rivers / that want to run through us.”
Taunting imagery triggered by primal instincts dot the pages of Circle Back. Clay brings us along on his journey fore and aft, the future and past indistinguishable, beckoning us to not only stop and smell the roses but even the reptiles—“the air smelled / like snakes . . .”
Lyrical invocations of animals personified take flight through existential skies as Clay tries to reassemble the fragmentations of life. “Like a crow I crossed / the country gathering / pieces of myself / to set in the sand.”
In his self-titled poem, Clay evokes a brooding daydreamy state where he travels back not so much in time, but into the time of himself—allowing us to feel the human experience that ties us all together. “No one was in the dream except for / himself at every single age of his life. / A father holding himself as a child. / A child comforting an older, confused / and drifting version of himself.”
Clay closes with a visceral, punchy poem entitled, “What I Pray For,” where his longings are not what you would expect from that “day I watered the garden, / And from the dirt a dozen birds flew out.”
Adam Clay’s, Circle Back, is a flowing river with poems seemingly lobbed into its flow. But, when the water settles and clears, we see the intricate, fractal patterns of verses not so much cast, as well placed. Where time and self are not linear, like the round river Clay suggests, that flows through us all.
Thank you, Milkweed, for the advance reader copy.