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How we long to be remembered–our loves, our deeds, our fears, our desires. In Neolithic Imaginings, Loralee Clark explores our yearnings–the “stitch in the web of us”–through the epic lens of megalithic structures erected 7000 years ago. She moves nimbly across time and place–from Turkey to Orkney. This collection of confident and expansive poems is deeply researched and delightfully infused with myth, fable and imagination. With a psalm-like quality, Clark explores our shared human concerns over millennia–the wonder of the stars, our desire to sustain our earth, our fear of suffering, our quest for love; “People who shaped their bodies as songs to be sung together”. The imagined details of custom, ceremony and liturgy are lovingly rendered; “You listen to the haw, tip its waxy berries into the pots to grind and cook later; sweet drink during winter.” She invites us to consider how we make meaning in our own lives through rituals of relationships, transition, age and season, and what are the stones we slab, carry, stack and carve in the hope of understanding what lies beyond us, of being spared from misfortune, and maybe even of being remembered. In the authoritative and tender hands of Clark, we take a memorable and wise journey through the history of man that feels monolithic and yet intimae, as if we have taken a seat by the fire with our Neolithic ancestors.
--Ann Chinnis, Pushcart Prize recipient, 2025,
Author of Poppet, My Poppet and I Can Catch Anything
Neolithic Imaginings: Mythical Explorations of the Unknown is a captivating excavation of our ancestors’ relationship to each other, to the earth, and to “the endless above.” Through vivid imagery, Clark guides the reader on a journey to ancient sacred sites where people “map[ped] the perpetual cycles of sky,” studied the connections between “themselves and the land, the sun’s seasons, the stars’ language and the moon’s time.” She draws a through-line between the loss of past communal practices and our current epidemic of loneliness. With hope that we might “listen again to the plants, relearn their lessons of trust, diversity, [and] co-existence,” Clark proposes a more purposeful path—one that leaves humanity less “lonely and adrift.”
--Teresa Burns Murphy, author of The Secret to Flying
Neolithic Imaginings: Mythic Explorations of the Unknown, guides us through an excavation of ancient monuments to discover the wisdom that’s buried there. With an archeologist’s delicate hand and eye, Clark unearths the magic of stones, plumbs the starry depths and even the spaces between all things. She entreats us to listen to the endless singing of the sky, the stolid stones who speak the language of permanence, the vast circles and rings that shape all of creation. These enchanting poems call us to imagine ourselves… in the time when the stars themselves kissed the ground, pushing chaos into becoming. With evocative imagery and a voice often haunted and mystical, she summons the engineers, alchemists and mystics to propel us to the places where neolithic memories are embedded and with them the knowledge that everything is alive – songs of a stone, voice of a stag’s horn, trees and even time itself, all nested in intimate connection.
--Thayer Cory, author of Carried and Cracked Open
Rollright, England: Extended Cognition
We send our questions with the logs of pine, the black henbane
we send questions into the fire, inhaling the smoke’s plumes
as trees and meadow read the stars’ maps embedded in our bones.
We lift and lay the slabs, our ladder to the stars,
healing and fortifying, energy flowing from the plants and smoke
through our chests into the stones, singing itself to sky.
We laid the boulders of this compass rose, this womb, cup of spirit
rings rippling outward, a path leading into the center: balance,
wholeness, writing our presence on the land,
scribing our roots above the ground.
We read the moon’s face, hanging,
whispering her rhythms of the sheep and cows that have come:
we learn to separate and stable them by sex,
let the births happen in the spring with plenty;
soon we build the fire high with rowan branches
as the grain cakes are made with rosemary.
After they bake we wipe the ash on the cattle’s heads, the sheep’s’ wool
to protect them for the summer pasturing,
walking them in rings around the cracking fire,
the sheep jumping the coals later as the stars shine like chips of ice overhead.
Burn the wood, scatter the ash
fur and skin, fire within
let protection begin:
living meadow, fire a god
ash the holy protection spoken by stars.
We claim the connections, the doors, windows and pockets,
we tie and strengthen the cords living between the moon and our bodies,
between the animals and their thrumming
swaying, slotting into the spaces of our bodies
where they fit, seamlessly: joined twinnings.
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