You Let Me Cry Again

Braddie Clark

I can't find anything on Durham, North Carolina's Moore Press, but I'm thinking it's another vanity press. Clark's verse is marginally more polished and well-thought-out than Watt's, but still looks like stuff the majority of even low-quality magazines would return without comment:

The Reaper
Will surely come,
His sickle drawn and ready.
He'll smite the grain
To the ground
With an arm that's strong
And steady.

(Another random passage.)

I found nothing at all about Braddie Clark online, but one of the wonderful things that often happens at huge book sales is that one comes across something one never expected to find. In this case, a personal glimpse at Braddie Clark's life that says more than a hundred volumes like this ever could. This book was sent to a Mr. Moore (no relation to the press, one assumes, or Mr. Moore would have had it) upon Moore's inviting Clark to join the International Platform Association, a political activist group (that's still active). Somehow, Clark's 1977 letter to Moore, on a single sheet of spiral-bound notebook paper, has managed to stay inside the book's inner cover this long, made it to the Case Western book sale, and thus into my collection.

A single star for the poetry; five for what came with it.