out into the world. . . If we have been given the gift of the world, the very least we can do in return is to give it our attention. I think that one of the main concerns of poetry, and of all art, is openness, laying yourself open to fresh experience, actively going towards it.

The Hundred Thousand Places is Clark's latest book-length act of attention to the gift of the world, eighty-four minimalist poems, each of them open to the particulars of fresh experience, the records of a mind selflessly accommodating itself to the 'occasional entertainment' of the seashores, lochs, mountains, stones, running water, creatures, plants, and weather of the Scottish highlands and islands.

The book is in four parts, and the poems range in length from three to seventeen short lines; we encounter them at the rate of one per page, with plenty of white space around each of them. The first part consists of twenty-four poems, and begins with dawn ('once again / for the first time / morning') and sea mist 'closing / every distance'; the mist lifts, colour ('the first / candour') appears, and soon we are walking 'out / into space / as to / an appointment' with a world bright with the specificity of flowers, grasses, and birds. We encounter no fewer than twenty-three different plants in this section, plants whose names have their own poetry - gorse flower, primrose, bird's foot trefoil, thrift, campion, thyme, clover, heather, bugloss, lyme grass, orpine, sorrel, sea kale, thistle, asphodel, milkwort, eyebright, ling, water-mint, vetch, bog cotton, honeysuckle, and dog rose - and in the context of the poem each naming is an act of attention, a noticing of 'lovely particulars / brighter than their names'. We also encounter birds: lapwing, snipe, cormorant, herring gull, redshank, plover, lark, and corncrake, an ornithological series which culminates (in the last poem of the first part) in a moment reminiscent of Basho at his most austere:

The walking in the first part of the book takes place in balmy, spring-like weather and in the relatively gentle setting of beach, headland, dune, and machair, with a turn away from the sea into a quiet glen of 'thistledown and bog cotton' just before the end of the section; in the second part, a sequence of thirty poems separated from the first part by two blank pages, the going gets much tougher, as we move into highland country, a mountain world of 'blackland and moorland / grassland and acid heath', of 'constantly / spilling water', of steep slopes and a difficult ascent, of 'vistas" and 'desolations', followed by a return across a moor, past a small loch, and through a pine forest. There is a very different ecosystem here: this is a place of moor grass, moss, dry whin thorns, grey lichens, heather, and dwarf juniper, and, in contrast to the profusion of colour in the first part of the poem, the only flowers noticed in this environment are tormentil, a single violet, and butterwort, the 'purple flower / of emptiness':

In the third part, the going gets easier again: at the beginning of this twenty-poem sequence we enter 'a steep-sided glen', where we go 'on and on / deeper into green / led by implication'. Here we have entered the comfort of woodland, a place of bog myrtle, birch saplings, alders, and numerous other trees:

The Marvellian adjective green appears frequently in this section, and, although there is a brief, four-page episode during the walk when we 'move among stones', these stones have been softened by green, by 'moss growing over them / trees breaking through them', until a shoulder-height boulder seems to be a miniature, Japanese-style landscape 'with moss-covered ledges / ridges and ravines'. The section ends with a return of flowers, a shed skin, a tumble-down emblem of the transience of human endeavour (even if it is an emblem which is robust and un-allegorical enough to rest one's back against), and a finally achieved serenity, the coming to fruition of many years' experience:

After the freshness of the morning seashore, the rigours of midday on the high moors and the mountains, and the rich woodland pleasures of the afternoon, in the fourth part of the book we descend to the evening and to the lowlands:

We are back by the seashore, but the atmosphere is very different from when we started: 'the hill that was bright / is now dark'. This is the shortest part of the book (it is only ten poems long), and it contains the most austere, sometimes even wintry, imagery. In the penultimate poem we arrive at a place where steps descend into water:

There is here, I think, a conscious echo of Elizabeth Bishop's great imaginative descent into 'the clear gray icy water' in 'At the Fishhouses', where the chilly seawater in the harbour at Great Village in Newfoundland is characterised as being 'like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free', a wild and cold embodiment of the inhospitable otherness of a planet we can only turn into our home through the use of imagination. Regardless of whether this is an allusion to, or just a parallel with, Bishop's poem, at this moment in Clark's book, the image has, for all the understatement in Clark's handling of it, a similar force and resonance to the closing lines of Bishop's poem, and it is this resonance which prepares us for the final page:

Describing the book in the way I have been doing, almost as if it were a record of a single day's walk and, by implication, a narrative which suggests that the four parts of this day might stand for the four seasons, or even for four stages in a life (the colours and flowers of childhood, the vigour of early maturity, the earned relaxation of late maturity, the bleak knowledge of old age), runs the danger of making the book sound more schematic than it is. The writing in fact avoids allegory in a number of ways. One is that, although the book is divided into four parts corresponding to segments of the daylight hours, it would, I think, be impossible to cover the mileage suggested by the descriptions in a single day. It seems rather that this is an anthology of moments from numerous walks which have been allowed to cluster together in groups according to the time of day, type of landscape, and atmosphere which they portray. Thus, there is no straightforward, step-by-step narrative in any of the parts and, just as there is no knowing what you might see as a path crests a hill or emerges from trees, there is similarly no knowing what you might find next as you turn a page. Occasionally there are little runs of poems that go together to make a clearly connected mini-sequence, such as the five poems about 'rushing, dashing' mountain streams on pages 38-42, but the poem that follows on page 43 provides a drastic change of topic and perspective:

The relation between individual poems may thus be one of continuity and development, or, as here, one of contrast and surprise - or sometimes it is just a matter of 'nextness', as the movement from page to page mimics the intermittent, always unpredictable ways in which moments of fresh perception occur as one moves through an environment ('if you move / lightly / events will start / up from your feet').

The most important way in which the poem avoids symbolism and allegory, though, is through the intensity of its focus on specific things: the writing is in love with particulars ('through crushed water-mint / through particulars you come / to a blue boat moored / beside purple vetch'). Thus, even though I have occasionally suggested that an image might have some symbolic resonance (the 'snake skin', the 'broken wall'), the key point about these images is that they are first of all (and even finally) things perceived in the world: an actual snake skin, an actual broken wall. The poems' notations of things, processes, creatures, and small events in the world are both evocative and accurate ('a breeze / of small birds / moving through / birch leaves'), but it is often enough just to acknowledge the existence of things by listing their names; the poem about the trees in the hanging valley which I quoted earlier is one good example, and here is another:

Here a minimal account of a butterfly's movement and a list of simple names are delicately bound together by the (half-)rhyme scheme, and by alliteration and assonance ('drifts / lifting', 'cormorant / orpine / sorrel'), into a moment of unified perception.

Detail is all, both in the perception of the world and in the line-by-line, phrase-by-phrase handling of the language; as another seashore poem in the first part puts it:

The attention to linguistic detail and the small shifts in emphasis in the parallelism of the second stanza here are typical of the understated pleasures to be had from Clark's writing; the effect of a poem or a stanza often depends on this kind of minimal disturbance to the language. As another example:

Here, in addition to the allusion to Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North in the first two lines (or perhaps more specifically to Cid Corman's translation of it, which he titled Back Roads to Far Towns), we notice that this single-track road is not equipped with journey-facilitating 'passing places' but with 'pausing places' nicely situated to allow us to stop and observe the roadside flowers. The pause we make in our reading as we notice this minimal alteration to the language mimics the pause we make in our journey to attend to the lowly flowers.

Thus, although the book does have an over-arching shape which frames the specifics to which the writing attends so closely, this frame is not a rigid or constraining one, nor does it over-thematise observed particularities or bully them into becoming symbols; the frame is shapely enough to provide a sense of fullness and completion to the book as a whole, while simultaneously being open enough to allow unpredicted perceptions, especially visual ones, to register clearly on consciousness. With Clark's writing, what you get is very much what you see:

as far as you can go

over the machair

there is only surface

it is a plane

of appearance

where nothing

is deferred

lacking depth

you walk on the richly

embroidered ground