Lyrebird
Meredith Clark
978-1-913007-08-9 · 160 pages · 129 × 198 mm · Oct. 2020
Windows, mouths, buttonholes.
Frames making use of an absence.
Lyrebird is a story of loss, told in fragments. It is the documentation of a miscarriage and the chronicle of the dissolution of a relationship—a moving discovery on how it is possible to approach a thing with tenderness and still watch it break.
In this short lyrical memoir, Meredith Clark delves into light, memory, and the crushing absence of things not yet known.
Meredith Clark is a poet and writer whose work has received Black Warrior Review’s non-fiction prize, and appeared in Phoebe, Gigantic Sequins, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle, and is currently at work on a second book.
Praise & Reviews
Each sentence is finely crafted. Poetic and heartbreakingly wise. The images linger in you with a kind of elemental truth that feels like breath.
— Arisa White
[Lyrebird] slowly circles its heartbreak through understatement, poetic revelation, imagistic accord. It admits to its shortcomings gracefully, knows there is no way to write what cannot be undone.
— Jenny Boully
Loose with ghosts, absences, light, shadow, memory, time, and dreamwork, [Lyrebird’s] moving song is perforated with echoes and shards of our beautiful earth, our lost secrets, and the things for which we long and of which we let go.
— Jennifer S. Cheng
Lyrebird conjures life from absence, and part of that conjuring means attending to the world around and beyond us. […] Meredith Clark has written a glowing portal that calls us through to wherever we need to go.
— Steven Dunn
Excerpts
- Short section — The Seattle Review of Books
- Opening sections — Black Warrior Review (via A Common Place)
Misc.
- Cover artwork by Fred Ingrams
- Author photo by Jenny Jimenez