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. “Time, that cyclical ancestor is like a snake’s skin, is a slow-motion deep dance affording the stones’ wiser agency.” 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, Loralee 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