Author Description

Product Description From the moment survivors of Captain Cook's third voyage of discovery found that sea otter skins procured from Northwest Coast Indians would bring $100 apiece on the Chinese market, the future of the coast, the Indians, and the sea otters was irrevocably altered. Tom Clark's serial poetic history of the maritime fur trade documents and elaborates that change, linking white world fur traders with indigenes in extended metaphors of contact and confrontation. Distilling fact from decisive instance to yield an elegiac narrative of the original encounter, the poems develop implications that bring the story into current perspectives―engaging ethnology, ecology, geography, native cultural and mythic history versus the white European world. About the Author Tom Clark was the poetry editor of The Paris Review from 1963 to 1973, one of the prestigious journal’s most important decades. He published his own collections of poetry exclusively with Black Sparrow Press. His numerous literary essays and reviews have appeared in publications  including The New York Times, London Review of Books, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. He has also published six biographies of twentieth-century literary figures. Clark died in Berkeley, California, in 2018.