In Farm by the Shore, Thomas A Clark explores the landscape and culture of the Scottish highlands and islands through experience of covering the ground. His notations and fragments keep the precarious balance between sea and land, wilderness and civilisation. Everything is played out in a context of weather. The spaces between the poems, which both link and divide them, are shades of quiet, indications of time or distance, or graphs of the vagaries of attention. In such a climate, to farm, or walk, or write, is to persist. You come to one thing and then another. // 'With radical simplicity, Thomas A Clark's writing gives us the unfussy beauty of the natural world. There's not much that I ask of poetry that isn't present here.' Matthew Welton



Thomas A Clark lives in a fishing village on the east coast of Scotland. With the artist Laurie Clark he runs Cairn Gallery, a space for minimal and conceptual art. In exploration of some formal possibilities of poetry, his work often appears as installations or interventions in galleries or in domestic or public spaces. Publications include Tormentil & Bleached Bones (Polygon, 1993), Distance & Proximity (Pocketbooks, 2000), The Path To The Sea (Arc, 2005), The Hundred Thousand Places (Carcanet, 2008), and Yellow & Blue (Carcanet, 2014). Numerous small cards, books and prints from his own Moschatel Press explore presentation as an aspect of form.