Blue Norther and Other Poems

These are poems that range in subject and setting from the profane to the sacred. Rooted in the life and culture of the South and Southwest and employing a variety of forms and voices, they address the mysteries of the past, personal and collective, and survey the possibilities and liabilities of the present. Whether conversational or incantatory, each strives to approximate music, in keeping with the author's insistence that dancer and dance be one.

"I am sometimes fortunate enough to discover a superior talent that has lain unexposed for many years in my own back yard. Scarcely fifty miles to my west Bedford Clark has been writing and publishing poetry as good as any written in the country, and yet, but for an e-mail inquiry, I might never have stumbled upon him. Here in his first book of poems is a collection of fine poetry with a broad range of technique and subject matter: that dresses itself in the loose robes of free verse or dons the formal dress of the sonnet; that treats the lowly ant lion and then the mystical Lilith; that focuses on tenure deliberations and lawn care and then the tragedies of the Oklahoma City bombing and Hurricane Katrina. I can say of Bedford Clark what I have heard said of Yeats and so said of him myself: `Here is a poet who never wrote a bad line and who knows how to end a poem."'---Paul Ruffin, 2009 Texas State Poet Laureate