Mnemosyne: The Long Traverse by Carolyn Clark

As I read Mnemosyne: The Long Traverse I knew I had lived a lifetime with family, friends and nature. I know Carolyn personally as we ride our horses together sharing many of the same joys; being out in woods and fields, or following along a river. I also hike, farm and travel. The poems touched me deeply and though I read the book in December and planned to write a review then. I wanted to take time and read through the book again so sweet and poignant are the poems. So beautiful are they all but my favorites were Baby in White and Finding you and me.

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Full disclosure: the poet, Carolyn Clark, is married to my brother. I love them both but am under no obligation to love the poems in this chapbook, or to say so in this space. But I do. The 18 poems represent a “long traverse,” from the poet’s youth to the present, covering a span of 30 years. I am a classical archaeologist and so especially liked the many allusions to classical antiquity, beginning with the title of the collection: Mnemosyne, or Memory, the mother of the Muses. The author grew up in a town called Ithaca, near towns called Syracuse, Rome and Carthage, Romulus, Homer, Hector and Hannibal—is it any surprise to find the impress of Greek and Roman antiquity on these poems? How can the writer ride a bus through the town of Moira without musing on Fate? But, despite the poet’s credentials in the Academy—a doctorate in Classics from Johns Hopkins—her poems are wholly free from academic pretension. Clark reflects on the small and large happenings in her life, and the routes through her memory effortlessly draw us into our own.

Refracted through myth, the collection is rooted in memories of family. Clark dedicates the volume to her parents, and inscribes individual poems to her daughter (“the space between the snowflakes is reserved for you”), brother, father, grandfather, to close friends, her writing professor (“Give your soul to your speech”), and to her husband (“we are two skipping stones on flat water, thrown side by side”). Great affection for the natural world infuses the writing. In these poems we come to know the poet, canter on horseback through woods with her, hike an alpine ridge in a steep ascent, ski down a mountain in search of balance. Dark reflections on Troy (“blood drenched city slave to blue knives”) and death (“The book is full, I’ll write no more”) alternate with poignant and hopeful poems (“Nature is always offering a new weave for the wavering soul, Some fresh foothold for the onward climb”). Together, these poems take us on a journey with stops where we have also paused, and the poet’s words enrich our own memories. That’s quite a lot for a slim volume to give us.

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

This collection of poetry is a wonderful blend of personal expression and myth. Carolyn Clark draws readers into her way of looking at the world, mysterious and magical. The ancient gods are alive in these poems, offering ways to better understand our lives and find meaning in the practice of remembering. For students of myth as well as all readers of lyric poetry, this book is an inspiring and generous gift.

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Carolyn Clark’s poems of personal experience, many of them drawn from her youth, suffuse warmly, sinuously into the universal: her Grandpa, and his granddaughter, are at once our own and we ourselves; and the impressionability, even shockability of her verses’ youthful “heroine” wondrously coalesce with insights from a middle age attained and an old age keenly imagined. In her refractions of classical myth, we are shown with clarity, for example, how Helen, had she been Iroquois, might not have been accomplice to Troy’s Armageddon. An evocative traverse of the young, the old, the ancient.

–Richard A. LaFleur, Franklin Professor of Classics Emeritus, The University of Georgia

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

This is a refreshing book. In one of her poems, Carolyn Clark writes “Nature is always offering/ a new weave/for the wavering soul.” In these lyrical, observant poems she brings together the strands of myth, the natural world, family, friendship, and collective and personal memory to create her own new and illuminating weave.

–Nan Fry, poet and author of Relearning the Dark

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]