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THOMAS A CLARK

Thomas A Clark was born in Greenock, Scotland.

His poetry has been consistently attentive to form and to the experience of walking in the landscape, returning again and again to the lonely terrain of the Highlands and Islands.

 In 1973, with the artist Laurie Clark, he started Moschatel Press. At first a vehicle for small publications by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Cid Corman, Jonathan Williams and others, it soon developed into a means of formal investigation within his own poetry, treating the book as imaginative space, the page as a framing device or as a quiet around an image or phrase, the turning of pages as revelation or delay.

 From 1986, Laurie and Thomas A Clark have run Cairn Gallery, one of the earliest of "artist-run spaces", specialising in Land Art, Minimalism and a lyrical or poetic Conceptualism. After many years in the Cotswolds, the Clarks moved in 2002 to reopen the gallery in Pittenweem in Fife. 

In addition to his books and smaller publications, Clark has also made site-specific installations in galleries, in gardens or in the landscape, and has many works in permanent collections world-wide. 

In addition to his work with Moschatel Press, Thomas A. Clark led a group of artists installing artworks in the new Stobhill Hospital, Glasgow for its opening in 2009.

To see more of Thomas A Clark's work, visit his blog HERE.

Thomas A Clark, Pausing Place. Photograph of a mountainous landscape in the distance, a body of water, grass in the foreground, and a roadsign (which is the artwork) that reads: PAUSING PLACE.

Thomas A Clark, Pausing Place. Copyright Thomas A Clark. Image courtesy of the artist.

Text reads: TURNING
Text reads: on turning to take, the steep hill slope, there is a lightness, where your own shape, and weight are forgotten, in an access of brightness, and though the day is dark, turning brings a clarity, as if a gentle rain, had renewed each possibility, of sea, air and hill, moss, grass and stone.
Text reads: it is a moment only, when the heather and gorse, are clear and strange, and present with the force, of immediate things that will, immediately change, steady yourself, on the curve of the hill, that pushes against you, dig in your heel, and let the sky settle, into place about you
Text reads: now the wind describes, the curve of your cheek, and now in a lull, of wind there is the ache, of stillness, of sunlight, on primrose and tormentil, in a transition as swift, as from standing to falling, or fom awkwardness, to mobility of feeling, one wide arc might link, severity to excess
Text reads: as you bear down, on the slope you are lifted, above it into sky, and the weight that was shifted, from one foot to another, has fallen away, each gesture is at once large and precise, so much is at stake, as each gesture is released from the last, a skua scolds from a rock
Text reads: at each turning there is, a chance of the recovery, of near and far, to step out of the scenery, of accomplished fact, into a privilege of air, in turning around, you may open up a space, in everything you know, and if you have the grace, and tenacity it may, be somewhere you might go

Turning by Thomas A Clark, in The Path to the Sea. Arc Publications. 2005. Copyright Thomas A Clark.

A block of green coloured text, it reads: Above the trees, on the far horizon, there is a little field, a patch of green, a place to turn to again and again, where speech and thought can let go and come to rest in looking.

Thomas A Clark, Moschatel Press 1999. Copyright Thomas A Clark.

Thomas A Clark and Laurie Clark: an illustration of a primrose on the right hand side and a poem on the left, which reads: every time you find / a primrose it is / the first primrose

Thomas A Clark, Laurie Clark. Moschatel Press 2019. Copyright belongs to the artists,

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