1988  AML Award: Poetry

Presented to:
Dennis Marden Clark

For:
Tinder: answer might be. With an almost Augustinian Dry Poems

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Dennis Marden Clark’s first collection of poems provides an occasion to honor him as one of the best of younger Mormon poets. He is not only an exceptional poet, but has served the cause of poetry -- and of Mormon letters -- as a fine editor (of poetry for Sunstone), anthologist (of a forthcoming collection of Mormon poetry), and critic and bibliographer. And he has now founded his own press for publishing poetry. Tinder provides us, in a lovingly chapbook, twenty-one of Dennis Clark’s best poems. They reveal the great range of his subject matter, from a sonnet for his daughter’s baptism, to an elegy for his brother’s deaf ear, to an ode for his father’s garden, from immersion in a glacial lake to utter rejection of a nuclear doings on Jackass Flats, Nevada. They show the qualities of his voice, from lyric elegance to down home Orem vernacular, from engaging what he calls the "soil you have banked against your ruin" to "one good joke to get us through today." His work is indeed tinder for our burning.

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