The Sunday Poet: Llyn Clague

Llyn Clague is a poet based in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.  His poems have been published widely, including in Ibbetson Street, Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, New York Quarterly, and other magazines.  His seventh book, Hard-Edged and Childlike, was published by Main Street Rag in September, 2014.  Visit www.llynclague.com

Hunger In A New Yorker Poem

Visual, sensual, genteel,

the poem “Quahogs” in this upscale

mag jogs forward in a tide-steady

rhythm, measured, controlled,

describing clamming by the sea.

Auditory, olfactory, tactile,

in verbal as well as physical

markers, the verse progresses

from tidal flats to rake tines

to the character and color

of the shells: “Opal or pearl …,

their whorls and purple stains.”

Compact, concrete, picturesque:

it’s a best-of-friends evening

scene, with the “sky blazing,

its sinking orange fire.”

With even “the air in savor,”

delightful “precious butter”

drips on “the succulent

of the freezing dark sea.”

Sandily gritty, precisely

specific, grandiosely

the poem raises its sights

from one night’s appetite

for clams and friends by the sea

to the notion of a durable,

universal human hunger,

a “domain immeasurable.”

Delicately, tastily, prettily

worded, its private hankerings

lead to yearning for meaning,

universal, noble, eternal.

To the hunger, very measurable,

of people not clamming by the sea,

this verse avoids allusion,

artfully, assuredly, gently.