Author Bio:
Mark Clement is retired and lives in the quiet town of Cobourg Ontario. Mark went to highschool in Cornwall Ontario and in 1958 had his first poem published in the St. Lawrence highschool yearbook. Following highschool, Mark attended what is now called a 'community college' and became a technocrat in the field of electronics. Work and family life overtook poetry and Mark didn't begin writing again until the mid '70s. Since that time, he has become increasingly active in the world of poetry and since his retirement, poetry has changed from an avocation to an almost full-time job.
Today, Mark has non-paying jobs as webmaster and doing the layout of chapbooks and anthologies for The Ontario Poetry Society. In between, he manages to write a poem or two and participate in the local Cobourg Poetry Workshop. This is Mark's first full collection of poetry.
About "Islands In The Shadow"
Mark Clement, in Islands in the Shadow, does what poems best do; they evoke places and times forgotten and familiar. The reader will hear them clearly in the mind's ear for they are in that fine tradition where poetry has more than meets the eye. Since Robert Frost, there has not been anyone like Mark Clement for encounters with the natural world. His adventures and returns make visible a uniquely detailed, precarious landscape of the mind that we couldn't discover without him. When one sees the images in his voice and hears the words on the page you will realize you are being presented poems by a true craftsman. Clement reaches beyond the vocabulary and grammar of other poets with a skill that comes from the love of both words and nature.
------------------------------------------------------------------
What others have to say...These poems do what poems best do; they evoke places and times forgotten
and familiar. I think them aloud. I hear them in the mind's ear for they are
in that fine tradition where poetry has more than meets the eye. ......................................................................................... Eric Winter
------------
When he is heard at readings - and when his images are seen on the page - the way he makes words work causes you to know that Mark Clement sees the creation of poetry as artisanship. Vocabulary, grammar and just about all the devices known to 'the poetic race' are wielded with a dexterity that tells us Mark would refuse to settle for the title wordsmith; with "Islands in the Shadow," he aspires to be nothing less than a master craftsman. .............................................................. James Pickersgill
------------
Since Robert Frost, there has not been anyone like Mark Clement for encounters with the natural world. His adventures and returns make visible a uniquely detailed, precarious landscape of the mind that we couldn't discover without him. ............ I.B. Iskov, Founder, The Ontario Poetry Society
---------------------------------------------------------------
Listen to this poem >
Sign for fellow travelers… Footprints wash away in rain and words
get confused in high winds that play
between the changing trees. Time is
an invention that tricks our memory.The fool in his motleys makes each day
a different play. We have no rule to read,
no program or diagram carved
on any weathered stone.It would seem that we are lost, twisting
like leaves that come and go forever.
But, leaves know when to be green,
when to be brown and flutter down
to be reclaimed. I hug the tree,
hoping it will tell me
how it's done.