What Lies Ahead
and other essays
CAROLINE CLARK
forthcoming
Isbn 9782919582396 – July 2026 – 78 pages – 15 € / £14
In line with Martin Buber’s view that “All real living is encounter”, Caroline Clark, in this fertile and regenerative collection of literary and semi-autobiographical essays, reveals to us a poetic voice passing ineffably between the past and present, in prose that explores the remoteness between the author speaking out and the reader waiting for that voice to arrive. Here we encounter a sensibility rooted in Osip Mandelstam’s idea that poetry, refuting chronological time, can keep us “awake forever”.
These essays, their clarity and depth, their combined humbleness and literary erudition, display a skilful blend of the personal and the impersonal, and testify to the author’s profound interest in the natural world, nostalgia and memories, languages (as a translator from Russian herself), while she deftly navigates her way through various writers, from Scott Fitzgerald, Ágota Kristóf, T. S. Eliot, Paul Celan to Clarice Lispector. Clark plays with the dichotomy between time and timelessness, words and silence, in the hope to speak beyond the limits of language and redirect not just herself, but also any reader attentive and receptive enough, towards their “future-directed lives”, ultimately towards What Lies Ahead.
“In these essays, written over a span of almost two decades, one has the sense that Clark is feeling her way into and through years of accumulated reading, contemplation, and experience to loosen a stream of thoughtful reflection that ebbs and flows as it searches its way towards her reader. Oh, how fortunate to be on the receiving end. ”
Joseph Schreiber, essay editor at Minor Literature[s]
“These essays have a sublime intelligence and a vivid perceptiveness that give the reader the space to reflect and reconsider the way we live – as readers, writers and human beings. A delight and an inspiration.”
Victoria MacKenzie, author of For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Each Leaf, Each Curve of Stem (Bloomsbury, 2027)
“These essays track associations with a touch both light and deft. Ceaselessly exploring, looking and listening, Caroline Clark manages to hold different places and times in isolation, allowing them to co-exist whilst retaining the dignity of their specificity. The result is a respect for the places, the memories and the writers she puts before us. Rather than mirrors, she offers us doors and windows, inviting us to walk and peer, to better understand what we might otherwise pass by. She is a sometime interpreter who nevertheless resists interpretations, a guide down paths both overgrown and non-existent. She stops time, allowing us to pause long enough to start making sense of how the past folds into the present state we find ourselves in. She places in front of us an assembly of selves, both her own – as mother, partner, interpreter, writer, daughter – and others. From angles oblique and everyday, she journeys from Mandelstam to Bluey, Fitzgerald to Lispector to Darwish, Kristof to Murnane. Moving with her husband from Moscow to Quebec and on to Sussex, where she evokes with dignity and respect the process of interpreting from Russian for Ukrainian refugees. Somehow she unravels things whilst allowing them their integrity, analysing without eviscerating as she greets, reads and writes.”
Caroline Clark is the author of the poetry collection Saying Yes in Russian (Agenda Editions, 2012), Sovetica, a collection of poem-stories and photographs (2021) and Own Sweet Time: A Diagnosis and Notes, a work of experimental non-fiction (2022), both published by CB editions. She co-translated In Praise of Poetry by Olga Sedakova (Open Letter Books, 2015) with Stephanie Sandler and Ksenia Golubovich; they were awarded the 2015 Heldt Prize for Best Translation in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women’s Studies. She also edited David Rose’s novel Meridian (Unthank Books, 2015), and is a fellow of Snow lit rev. She works as a community interpreter for Russian speakers in her hometown of Lewes, UK.