"Robert Pack is one of the most important poets of our epoch. In a career that exceeds fifty years he has explored his life and the lives of people in our society with unparalleled intelligence and beauty. His new book Clayfeld Holds On is remarkable for its exuberance, profundity, and sheer joy. He is one of the poets by whom our culture will be known in times to come."

Erica Jong

"In his stunning, brilliant new collection, Clayfeld Holds On, the octogenarian Robert Pack revisits the lamp-lit chambers of his alter ego, Clayfeld (Old Adam) some thirty years on. These poems are hard-won, informed with a rare wit, compendium of knowledge, and deep intelligence, by turns heartbreaking, full of wisdom and a Swiftian sense of the folly of human endeavor, and funny as hell. And then there are ghosts that recline at the table of Pack’s symposium—Freud, Job, Shakespeare, Mozart, Frost and Stevens among them—nudging him on to tell one more story, while there is still time."

Paul Mariani, author of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life

"Clayfeld Holds On is a superb volume of late poems by Robert Pack, a singular voice in American poetry. Clayfeld is Pack’s alter-ego, raging against the dying of the light, walking down paths retaken with renewed gusto. The poet’s subtle cadences draw the reader forward through narratives of recovery toward self-discoveries that are world-discoveries as well. Clayfeld Holds On is a satisfying and resonant collection, a vision of reality that is gripping and profound."

Jay Parini, author of The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems

"Robert Pack writes in a  compassionate voice, full of humor and sorrow for all the losses, and yet always ready to take on more."

Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

"There are great pleasures in reading Robert Pack’s Clayfeld Holds On. Pack's new collection of poems is a culminating achievement by this deeply serious and at the same time irrepressibly playful writer."

John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home