White Thought, is a book of elegiac lyric reflections with an autobiographical grounding. In the late 1960's, Tom Clark emerged as one of the brightest voices of his generation. In the thirty years since, in his criticism in the San Francisco Chronicle and in book after book of poetry and prose, he has registered his responses to the cultural life of our times. Now, in the tradition of the poetic notions of Stephan Mallarmè, out of mid-life confrontations with mortality and illness, Clark has produced a cycle of poetic meditations on death and mourning occasioned in part by the death of his mother, Expressed as brilliant, lyrical rhapsodies, these poems are raised as a bulwark against despair and exist as a heroic reminder that poetry can give answers to abiding questions of meaning.