The Exile’s Papers Part Four: Just Beneath Your Skin, the Dark Begins, is the final chapter of Wayne Clifford’s sweeping sonnet sequence. In this volume, the exiled poet questions notions of truth, identity and salvation in his quest to describe and interpret a journey through life that is both familiar and unfamiliar.
The culmination of decades of effort, Wayne Clifford’s The Exile’s Papers is a four-part poetic journey that explores narrative duplicity, familial and romantic relationships, the correlation between love, sin and life, and finally, the notion that human life cannot be explained—or saved.
In this fourth and final volume of the sonnet sequence, Just Beneath Your Skin, the Dark Begins, the exiled poet adopts the role of the skeptic, calling into question religion and science, myth and history. Truth is subjective, beauty cannot be articulated, and redemption rests in the acceptance of one’s end. In this bleak, unfathomable, unknowable and inexpressible world, the exile’s struggles to live, to love, and to find meaning are bitterly honest and intimately familiar.
With endlessly varying sonnets ranging from the surreal to the straightforward, the mythic to the narrative, this volume of The Exile’s Papers unequivocally proves Clifford’s mastery of poetic form.