All These Things I Will Give to You
by Robert Clinton

Prophetic, farseeing, Robert Clinton has traveled the wilderness and returns with what he has witnessed. The poems in All These Things I Will Give to You seem nearly boundless, from the clans of the 30,000-year-old fires wherein the poet declares, “I want to touch the holy bear skull,” to the more contemporary and troublesome “I wonder if you’d still remember/the silver and green steel thermos.” These are passionate and exquisitely hewn poems, with image and voice at work together in what seem to be effortless constructions. In the digital age of poetry’s devaluation, Clinton’s rich and metaphorically complex work strives even at its most fantastical to touch the holy bear skull, which is poetry itself—a sacred vessel where each phrase makes its own shimmering world.

‘The poems in Robert Clinton’s All These Things I Will Give to You accumulate into metaphysics of the human condition. With mind-blowing ease, Clinton’s spirited sensibility locates within uncertainty a life affirming, heartwarming, enriching certainty, a finely tuned mindfulness that models the human spirit--the courage to go head to head with want and wanting, sometimes to prevail, sometimes simply to hold one’s own, sometimes to live to fight another day, the poems driven not by this outcome or that but by their drive to engage life on their own terms, to breathe life into the waiting air—all along an underlying dreamlike essence. In language and imagery, Clinton introduces an otherworld quality as he crosses from one dimension into another. Here, two examples of this surreality—the first in-your-face unreal: “a caterpillar… at once began spinning its cocoon from filaments of my flesh;” the second example, subtly understated: “The mime bathes in no water When he’s finished he walks away, leaving wet footprints on the sidewalk.” Take the opportunity to consider the mechanics of Robert Clinton’s startling structuring of language, of which there are many examples In All These Things I Will Give to You.’

—Allen Brafman, author of Wherever I Look I Am Never There

‘Robert Clinton’s imagination glints like a table saw. He builds boxes of words that contain rocks and rapids, jewelry and insects, love and divorce, a man’s polnt of view and a woman’s. His vision is dark, his “solitary pioneering” original and inexhaustible, assembling amazing instances of black: “black sleeves of a cherry tree,” “black as a wedding ring,” “black as cats asleep, black as butter.” He describes nature so that you remember the feel of it yourself, “the rocks have a sliding fur.” His water is “iron” and “plated.” The poems are at once deadly serious and hilarious. “She checks in her bag for the bag with the bags/of her bags.” He writes about what is “superior to happiness.” And he achieves it. Immortality. I love his love poems. ”Thermos,” silver and green, leaving it behind where the canoe was tied, standing upright in the tree roots “like a youth waiting for a train,” and symbolizing his, their, lost love. In “I couldn’t think”:

I noticed her   so hard       she had
to sit down

‘And after she “quit” him:

I wished her no
happiness     I cherished her

‘All These Things I will Give to You he gives with “mateless fingers.” The gift of a lifetime. I am thrilled to put my name on this book.’

—Jill Hoffman, founding editor, Mudfish; author of Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves

Read an excerpt from All These Things I Will Give to You