Brief commentary on “Eight Hours in the Nixon Era”:

Frost famously said that poets should lie to get at the truth. But, fact is, almost everything in this poem actually happened. Much of my outlook on politics was forged during the sixties. I came to see the profound injustices and inequities in U.S. culture, especially as manifest by the Vietnam War and racial strife, and since then I've tried to work to reverse these troubles. In looking back at those early days of cultural change, I've also come to see that many of us were a bit too self-righteous for our own good. We hadn't earned the “right,” so to speak, to our political haughtiness. There often existed too great a distance between our professed ideals and our personal lives. “Eight Hours” tries to map that distance.

Commentary on my body of work:

In the Evening of No Warning takes risks born of a passion for poetry to do what no poem can: to reclaim us from loss; to restore ourselves as whole, at home in time, loved, and loving. The result is sometimes somber, sometimes exhilarating. From the very opening ("Our Children Playing Catch in the Evening of No Warning"), it reminds us that life is always risky business, all the more for a middle-aged man with wife and kids who has "given hostages to fortune," yet who still burns with the memory of past lives—and who gathers fitful hints of another, more radiant life just beyond us.

—Stan Sanvel Rubin, Water-Stone, Fall 2002

In Kevin Clark's poetry there is an acute recognition of the precarious nature of our ordinary lives. He reminds us that we are always on the verge of falling; but in these poems, whether we fall into grace or misfortune, it's always into deeper knowledge, deeper appreciation for hard-won gifts.

—Kim Addonizio

Kevin Clark's poetry understands the limits of eros by experiencing those limits openly and thoroughly… And he understands passion for what it is, polymorphous, heartstrong and headdriven, not idea finally or ever, but protean force, to be ridden and ridden out and ridden again. Somehow this ecstatic poetry stops short of oblivion, accepts its margins, and seeks out the lovely surviving presences of marriage and family. I love this book for the flash and patience of its intelligence, but I learn what love is by the unique human occasion of it.

—William Olsen

From its beautifully poised title piece to its powerful concluding meditation on “Granting the Wolf,” Kevin Clark's haunted and haunting In the Evening of No Warning is by turns celebratory, sardonic, and elegiac. Clark is a deeply thoughtful poet whose narrative gift is always enhanced by a searching and restless consciousness; his melodies are limber, his language scrupulous and urgent.

—Sandra M. Gilbert

Kevin Clark's new volume of poetry wears the anxious velvet mantle of Time gone magical with sleights of hand. What vanishes is us. Yet, the very passing itself, musical with its children's hour, becomes the unthinkable and sublime refuge that all the local nostalgias gather about. Many of these poems are altogether sweet and perfect. This is a wonderful book.

—Norman Dubie