The Early Morning Clapboarder

The Early Morning Clapboarder by Neville Wilson takes its title from his poem about being woken at dawn by the cacophony of birds on Maine's first day of spring: Plunged into the sensory overload of their song he surfaces in a quiet so rich that he hears the everyday sounds made by a roadsweeper, a train, and a clapboarding carpenter as if for the first time. In this collection, Wilson describes the wonder of experiences like this, revealing the magic in the everyday. Among some of the experiences for these poems are a man feeding seagulls at the beach, surface ice changing shape on the creek, Vermeer's discovery of anamorphism in his coffin, his father transformed by a car-ride, and his wife going on "walkabout." His poems assert too how with values in flux and life so brief there are no certainties only possibilities. The meaning of a life is revealed through moments of felt experience. Love is central to these moments and memory is our way of reliving it. These poems are about the wonder of the everyday, how love, memory and ways of seeing help us face the brevity of life.