'to be affected in many ways is the sole ambition of the days' thrums grows out of Clark's celebrated collection, that which appears, in an extension and affirmation of that book's particular aesthetic. Including poems first published in London Review of Books and New York Review of Books, the poems' closely observed landscapes tell of presence and loss, of change and precarious continuity. One of Scotland's most distinctive writers, a vivid minimalist, ruralist and experimentalist, his selected poems, The Threadbare Coat (2020), is also published by Carcanet.