Dark Brown

“The poems in Dark Brown try to use words as “Part of physiology” and as a way to shed secrecy, mystery, self-protection and self-censorship and to expose the vulnerable “spiritmeat” of the self. The poetic action is now largely made up of assertions and assertive exclamations within the action-poem structure. Mr. McClure is still exploring consciousness: “no ease to truth. I half admit it”. But now the continuous invention catches up with his new dialectic between change and “the black unchanging gene”, an exchange which he cries out in acknowledgement of a world made new: “without image/metaphor. Bare fact./Strives to be truth./Simplicity/and nothing more./I ask you for nothing.”

Dark Brown ends with two remarkable erotic odes in praise of sensual love, in language the Censor hates because it projects what he fears. Mr. McClure celebrates here his re-invention of love in some of the most moving love poetry of recent years.” —The Times Literary Supplement (London)

“Dark Brown is one of the peaks of modern poetry in English. . . the most extraordinary collection of erotic poems ever published in the English language.” — G. Legman, Fact Magazine

“The most fantastic poem in America, called Dark Brown. . .” —Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

“I don’t know anyone else who has gone so far and I think the McClure poem is a landmark.”
—Allen Ginsberg Big Table