The Clerk's Tale: Poems – An Exquisitely Restrained Literary Debut Shot Through with Longing - Softcover

Reece, Spencer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618422544 ISBN 13: 9780618422548

Publisher: Ecco, 2004

Synopsis

In a recent double fiction issue, The New Yorker devoted the entire back page to a single poem, "The Clerk's Tale," by Spencer Reece. The poet who drew such unusual attention has a surprising background: for many years he has worked for Brooks Brothers, a fact that lends particular nuance to the title of his collection. The Clerk's Tale pays homage not only to Chaucer but to the clerks' brotherhood of service in the mall, where "the light is bright and artificial, / yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral." The fifty poems in The Clerk's Tale are exquisitely restrained, shot through with a longing for permanence, from the quasi-monastic life of two salesmen at Brooks Brothers to the poignant lingering light of a Miami dusk to the weight of geography on an empty Minnesota farm. Gluck describes them as having "an effect I have never quite seen before, half cocktail party, half passion play . . . We do not expect virtuosity as the outward form of soul-making, nor do we associate generosity and humanity with such sophistication of means, such polished intelligence . . . Much life has gone into the making of this art, much patient craft."

This unforgettable debut captures the sacred and the profane in modern American life—

• Poems about Work: From the meticulous rituals of Brooks Brothers salesmen to the fluorescent glow of the Mall of America, finding the monastic in the mundane.
• Lyrical Landscapes: Travel from the salt-sprayed porches of Cape Cod to the poignant, lingering dusk of Miami and the vast, empty farms of Minnesota.
• A Longing for Permanence: Wrestling with solitude and the transient nature of human connection in poems of exquisitely restrained emotion.
• Queer Experience: Poignant, clear-eyed portraits of gay life, from the quiet camaraderie of an ‘old homosexual’ coworker to the personal histories of love and isolation.

About this title

About the Author

Spencer Reece is a poet and priest. His first collection, The Clerk’s Tale, won the Bakeless Prize in 2003, selected by Louise Gluck, and his second collection, The Road to Emmaus, was longlisted for the National Book Award. He has received an NEA grant, a Guggenheim grant, a Witter Bynner Prize from the Library Congress, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Scholar, and The New Republic. He served at the Honduran orphanage Our Little Roses, and works for the Bishop of Spain for the Reformed Episcopal Church, Iglesia Española Reformada Episcopal.

Reviews

"Inside everything was Episcopalian— / the wicker chaise lounges, the small spotted mirrors, / the rattan dining room set, the tears." Reece's evocation of a family house on Cape Cod, eventually sold, exemplifies the twin currents of detached humor and sorrow that run through his début collection. The most effective poems here are autobiographical, recording early family life; a period spent recovering from a nervous breakdown in hospitals and borrowed houses ("My legacy is to leave the room empty"); and a new life in retail—hence the title. Reece's poems are saved from solipsism by a keen alertness to the characters around him and to the consolations of the natural world. Animals please him, because they are happier than people—"The ponies said: This day astounds us. The field is green." And resignation brings with it a kind of peace, as in a poem written on the poet's birthday in a lonely Florida town: "It is not Paris it is not Florence / but it has majesty in its anonymity."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Supple, atmospheric, and lucent, Reece's entrancing lyrics evoke the diametrically opposed yet equally affecting landscapes of Minnesota and Florida and consider the axis between solitude and connection, peace and pain, philosophy and madness. Reece's poems are at once splendidly fresh and deeply rooted in poetry's rich loam as he offers a witty yet moving variation on Chaucer's The Clerk's Tale and echoes the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and James Merrill. No academic, Reece is a longtime Brooks Brothers employee, and, accordingly, the title poem, originally published in the New Yorker, portrays two men, including an aging homosexual, who clerk in an upscale men's clothier in the Mall of America, an edifice Reece compares to a Gothic cathedral. Indeed, religious images surface often as the poet summons up childhood memories and evokes resonant vignettes, still lives, and today's cluttered versions of pastorals, subtly tracing the soul's uncertain progress from brute survival to transcendent receptivity and affirmation. Insightfully introduced by poet laureate Louise Gluck, Reece's striking debut yields new revelations with each reading. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Portofino

Promise me you will not forget Portofino.
Promise me you will find the trompe l’oeil on the bedroom walls at the Splendido.
The walls make a scene you cannot enter.
Perhaps then you will comprehend this longing for permanence I often mentioned to you.
Across the harbor? A yellow church. A cliff.
Promise me you will witness the day diminish.
And when the roofs darken, when the stars drift until they shatter on the sea’s finish, you will know what I told you is true when I said abandonment is beautiful.


The Clerk’s Tale

I am thirty-three and working in an expensive clothier, selling suits to men I call “Sir.” These men are muscled, groomed and cropped— with wives and families that grow exponentially.
Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties, of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots, of tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars, of foulards, neats, and internationals, of pincord, houndstooth, nailhead, and sharkskin.
I often wear a blue pin-striped suit.
My hair recedes and is going gray at the temples.
On my cheeks there are a few pimples.
For my terrible eyesight, horn-rimmed spectacles.
One of my fellow-workers is an old homosexual who works hard and wears bracelets with jewels.
No one can rival his commission checks.
On his break he smokes a Benson & Hedges cigarette, puffing expectantly as a Hollywood starlet.
He has carefully applied a layer of Clinique bronzer to enhance the tan on his face and neck.
His hair is gone except for a few strands which are combed across his scalp.
He examines his manicured lacquered nails.
I admire his studies attention to details: his tie stuck to his shirt with masking tape, his teeth capped, his breath mint in place.
The old homosexual and I laugh in the back over a coarse joke involving an octopus.
Our banter is staccato, staged and close like those “Spanish Dances” by Granados.
I sometimes feel we are in a musical— gossiping backstage between our numbers.
He drags deeply on his cigarette.
Most of his life is over.
Often he refers to himself as “an old faggot.” He does this bemusedly, yet timidly.
I know why he does this.
He does this because his acceptance is finally complete— and complete acceptance is always bittersweet. Our hours are long. Our backs bent.
We are more gracious than English royalty.
We dart amongst the aisles tall as hedgerows.
Watch us face into the merchandise.
How we set up and take apart mannequins as if we were performing autopsies.
A naked body, without pretense, is of no use.
It grows late.
I hear the front metal gate close down.
We begin folding the ties correctly according to color.
The shirts—Oxfords, broadcloths, pinpoints— must be sized, stacked, or rehashed.
The old homosexual removes his right shoe, allowing his gigantic bunion to swell.
There is the sound of cash being counted— coins clinking, bills swishing, numbers whispered— One, two, three, four, five, six, seven .s.s.
We are changed when the transactions are done— older, dirtier, dwarfed.
A few late customers gawk in at us.
We say nothing. Our silence will not be breached.
The lights go off, one by one— the dressing room lights, the mirror lights.
Then it is very late. How late? Eleven?
We move to the gate. It goes up.
The gat’s grating checker our cheeks.
This is the Mall of America.
The light is bright and artificial, yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral.
You must travel down the long hallways to the exits before you encounter natural light.
One final formality: the manager checks out bags.
The old homosexual reaches into his over-the-shoulder leather bag— the one he bought on his European travels with his companion of many years.
He finds a stick of lip balm and applies it to his lips liberally, as if shellacking them.
Then he inserts one last breath mint and offers one to me. The gesture is fraternal and occurs between us many times.
At last, we bid each other good night.
I watch him fade into the many-tiered parking lot, where the thousands of cars have come and are now gone. This is how our day ends.
This is how our day always ends.
Sometimes snow falls like rice.
See us take to our dimly lit exits, disappearing into the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul; Minneapolis is sleek and St. Paul, named after the man who had to be shown, is smaller, older, and somewhat withdrawn.
Behind us, the moon pauses over the vast egg-like dome of the mall.
See us loosening our ties among you.
We are alone.
There is no longer any need to express ourselves.

Copyright © 2004 by Spencer Reece.
Reprinted byy permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0618422544
• ISBN 13: 9780618422548
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80