O Lucky Day by Patricia Clark

O Lucky Day
by Patricia Clark

Madville Publishing, 2025

Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk, EIL Poetry Editor

“We can’t give up joy,” is a phrase that struck me as I read, sighing, Patricia Clark’s new book of poems, O Lucky Day. It’s in the poem “Our Next Breath” that also contains the lines, “Over ten days, there’s a war / in Ukraine, started by Russia for no good reason.” We know that war has continued, and it’s always on our minds these days. My husband keeps saying to me, “Why don’t they [the media] ask him [the President] why he’s not asking Russia to stop the fighting? Russia started the war,” and so on.  Sigh….

I mention my husband, because I thought of him a lot while reading the poems, from the “quarter-inch dark bits / of his beard on the sink’s / bowl” in “After My Husband Tries His New Electric Shaver” to standing side by side at a window to watch goldfinches in the purple coneflowers in the book’s final poem. Indeed, so much to identify with all the way through. We both have a sister named Chris, I learned from the poem “My Sister’s Osprey,” which made me want to call my sister. We both like the author Shirley Hazzard, I learned from “Italian Madonna.” We’ve both been learning about Swedish death cleaning:

     The Swedish, a practical breed with economy
     on their minds, believe in a clean cupboard like
     a conscience. Well ahead of your own demise, death-
     cleaning they call it. Go ahead, open your closet,
     and pick up a red shoe.

OK, I will! I’m still wearing the red ones, and “we can’t give up joy,” after all, but I’ll happily toss any shoe that pinches me, and anything that might burden or embarrass my descendants.

I’ll let you discover the sexy joy of the book’s title (hidden in a poem with another title) and the book’s cover (Still Life with Clementine by Jos Van Riswick), but here’s a taste: a poem called “Each Day I Undress” contains the phrase “I become a tongue” and then she becomes a viburnum bud, “branch tip quivering,

          a tight knot of white and red,

     knuckle size, a coiled energy about
          to burst…

As I read, I enter the moment. As I re-read, I know spring is coming…soon! While chaos swirls around me, I can’t give up joy.

Back to that gorgeous cover, that clementine peel dripping off the edge of the table, cut perfectly with a “small green / ceramic knife.” I see the precision, the skill, and I also feel my own fingers digging into a clementine, peeling it by hand. Is this the doubleness of poetry? How it can contain its opposite? Or am I simply the raw, eager reader, appreciating the skill of the poet? Whatever it is, I am glad of it. O lucky day!

Patricia Clark at EIL

Interview with Patricia Clark at EIL

Review of Sunday Rising by Patricia Clark at EIL