The New Yorker recently devoted the entire back page to a single poem, "The Clerk"s Tale," by Spencer Reece. This debut author"s first collection had been selected by poet laureate Louise Gluck from among 850 submissions to win the 2003 Bakeless Prize of the Bread Loaf Writers" Conference. The poet who drew such unusual attention has a surprising background: for many years he has worked for Brooks Brothers, a fact that lends particular nuance to the title of his collection.
The Clerk"s Tale pays homage not only to Chaucer but to the
clerks" brotherhood of service in the mall, where "the light is bright
and artificial, / yet not dissimilar to that founding a Gothic cathedral." The fifty poems in The Clerk"s Tale are exquisitely restrained, shot though with a longing for permanence, from the quasi-monastic life of two salesmen at Brooks Brothers to the poignant lingering light of a Miami dusk to the weight of geography on an empty Minnesota farm.
