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Think of Clem Schoenebeck as the music man, his poems inviting us to see possibilities of joy in the everyday, be it garden flowers or the Brahms Requiem, a brilliant sunset or the sterling qualities of a friend. Better yet, be his friend so he can write a poem about you and say such things as he is familiar with his own clouds, thus he seeks available light.
Where the Time Went is actually the Collected Poems of Clem Schoenebeck. There is abundance here enough for three to four ordinary books of poems. Clem gives us a turtle that hauls his own darkness and a sunset in which the outgoing tide is a rippling wash of wine. He describes The Care of Hardwood Floors in such loving detail you want to drop to your knees and get to it! To read these poems is to feel a sense of expansion: there’s so much to life. Songs to sing, children to nurture, family and friends to embrace, the natural world in all its manifestations.
-Claire Keyes, Professor Emerita of English, Salem State University,
author of What Diamonds Can Do
Reading the poems in Where the Time Went, I can think of no greater tribute than for Clemens Carl Schoenebeck to be called a priest of the invisible as Wallace Stevens might say. Witness Alles in Ordnug, for example, where sons are reassuring their father as he takes his final breaths that everything is fine…. This tercet’s summation, And the darkness knows everything, is the poet’s ineluctable refrain of a sublime liturgy. I am especially drawn to the FAMILY selection, exemplified by the starkly memorable Vespers in which the poet, as a boy, recalls accompanying his father to the state hospital for the mentally ill to visit my mother in her Purgatorial Home. The lines are sung by the poet who understands that only the passage of time instructs the catechism of one’s heart. There are poems in Where the Time Went that will linger in your consciousness long after being read…and some will never leave.
-Dennis Must, author of several story collections and novels including
the forthcoming Brother Carnival
