This is the first volume of Sketches of Home. It represents Suzanne's life in the mountains of Tennessee where she says she learned strength. A woman needs strength to raise a family, especially when trials beset her at every turn. She is currently working on a companion volume that represents her life by the water where she now lives and of which she says, "I am learning freedom and hearing the call to let go as my bare feet lead me farther along the shore." This second volume is scheduled to be published by Canon Press in the near future.

Read what poet and fiction writer Robert Siegel says about Sketches of Home I:

"Suzanne Clark has this astonishing gift of writing the mosaic of her life into a book-poem and handing it over to us whole--a present. All her prose is poetry, mysterious, but like her life never inaccessible. Her experience is seen not darkly through the glass of corruption and decay but lit with an unearthly blaze that lets each detail--each rag or tack or leaf or button or child's face or wisp of woodsmoke--achieve its own brilliant reality." Sketches of Home is a haunting story, a combination of familial inevitability and lovely surprise."

Here are a few selections from the book:

Sand Dollar

I've left my family far behind. My feet have their own life, taking me away and away. The naked beach curves like a woman's body. Watery hands clasp and free my ankles. Sandpipers look in mirrors left by the last wave. In the distance, sky and sand are one, and I am going there, drawn by the vastness of Being. I exalt in immensity, but there's also this loneliness, Lord, like an ache in my bones. Please give me a sign. I know it's outrageous to ask, but how about a sand dollar? You know how much I like them.

I chide myself for such a prayer as this. The Word tells me God is everywhere at once but here everywhere is swallowed up in the sea's thunder. Against the sheen of the infinite shore, I see the motions of my life carrying but the weight of a ghost crab. I've seen no sand dollars on this beach and barely any shells, but look, here it is at my feet--a flower floated down from heaven. I pick it up and study the star at the center drawn like a hieroglyph from another world. Yes, I'm with you, says the sign. I turn back the way I came, awed by the rune in my hand.

Blackberries

I was washing blackberries in the sink, proud of my stash, and was still picturing myself by the road picking pockets of briars. Then my father-in-law began to tell of a Castlewood woman who also went for blackberries, leaving her children in the car. "Be right back," she told them, swinging her bucket. A while later a policeman drove by and saw the children crying. "Mama's gone over there," they said. Off he went to find her in a wide field of weeds, the sun blazing. He saw no woman at all, only wilderness. He hurried to the edge of the field, to the blackberries, and there he saw her lying face-up in the grass with copperheads crossing her body and her eyes empty as the sky. Twenty years later I was making a cobbler of the treacherous blackberries, which we ate--the children, the father, the grandfather and I--thinking of the other mother and the vast field of harm from which we have been kept summer after summer.

Puddle Duck

Where was Emily? I looked all over the house. She was nowhere. I went to the front porch and there in the driveway in a puddle was Emily naked. My little duckling was singing and splashing as trucks and cars barreled down our rained-on street.

I love the incongruity of children--how they pull up mother's blouse to nurse in public. How they sweetly say, "You're so beautiful," when your hair has that rowdy slept-on look and you have coffee breath. How they pull on your arm when you are hotly being kissed by their father. How they wear plaids with stripes, take too much food, burp in church, and beat you at checkers. They are still free from the fixed order of things, free to strip and shout and recklessly forgive all who have done them wrong.

Falls

A staccato of rain announces me to the creek. I slip my way down a skin of leaves to inspect the waters of Roaring Falls. I like a loud place in the woods the way I like to yodel in my house. Sometimes I burst like milkweed and out come the crazed falsettos while the children gather to gawk. The other side of yodels is sobs. In church the Heaviness will descend, and I will be carried downriver breaking on a word, losing my mind in the Roaring Falls of grief. But now I am simply a guest standing on a mossy stone, safe from all devouring.