Paradise Resisted

In Paradise Resisted, Tom Clark has written what he calls "a personal field guide to the contemporary West." The 160 lyrics collected here are like snapshots from a magical mystery tour that starts in the cool blue Rockies, barrels through the desert, and at last breaks down somewhere deep in L.A., "as far west as civilization as known can come and still have a pet tarantula." The Wyoming firmament is wide open like a window into oblivion ("such a threatening space/ what with its great expanse of unaffectionate sky"); Eldora, Colorado, is tremblingly beautiful ("a valley/ of aspens/ and wild flowers/ with the wind/ dithering in them"); Arizona is mainly the sun ("blinding & frontal") and the highway ("a black unreeling truck lane to eternity"). The rural West is a resistible paradise: Clark feels only loneliness there, the little towns interchangeable, everything built as cheaply as possible. It is only in Los Angeles - the Capital City of Postmodernism, its man-made "canyons of concrete/ the perfect environment for a wild dog" - that he feels at home. It is here that he hopes to evolve, "bark by angry bark," into an artist "truly representative/ of the American 21st century."