Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     The distance Kate Clanchy has covered in a comparatively short time is impressive. She is no longer merely arriving on the literary scene but has set up camp and is staking a claim for serious recognition against fierce competition. Her titles are short. Nearly half of them are two words long. One expects economy in the poems too; and – yes – only ten of the thirty-nine here sneak beyond a page. Yet Clanchy’s style – despite its abundant eye-catching energy – causes problems which are not resolved until the smaller second part, ‘The NewHome Cabaret’. Here her writing embraces the tangible and does not flit – beguilingly, infuriatingly -– from image to image. This section concerns homemaking. Suddenly, after much fanciful verse whose direction is uncertain, the poet decorates, lays carpet, fixes a mirror. She writes best in dungarees, being more human and humane in B & Q than in the Bodleian. When she balances the values of both, the result is amusing and enlivening: “The man from Pickford’s Movers/ has wrapped my tin-opener/ (bought from Price-Busters/ and greased with years of tuna)/ in six layers of tissue paper” just as “Tutankhamun’s viscera” were “bottled in four amphorae/ and placed in alabaster/ serpent-and-jackal-headed sculptures...”.

     In most of her output she is rigorously nonprescriptive, which shows cool but also a wish not to involve too closely with her subject. In ‘The NewHome Cabaret’ she (like Douglas Dunn in Terry Street) sheds reserve and focuses with acuity. This is her best way forward, jettisoning the arbitrary, the anaemic, the conceptual, the nonsensical, and targeting reality with sharp-eyed resolution and her sleeves rolled up. Were she to linger among the inconsequentialities of ‘Conquest’ she would sell herself short: “And at night, on the moon,/ I am acrobatic and buoyant,/ radioing triumph to mission control,/ performing slow-motion/ elephant dances to my flag/ and the grand, indifferent stars”.

     The book’s title hints at the exotic, and the acknowledgements page pays tribute to British Council and Society of Authors disbursements which allowed her at least to “fly over Samarkand”. Yet all this yields is fifteen lines starting “If you should go to Samarkand/ you might find Scheherazade” and ending “there shall burn there Samarkand,/ and Samarkand, and Samarkand”. Readers expecting insight from the eleven intervening lines will be disappointed.

     The book does not get off to an auspicious start. Its first poems are low-key, deadpan, almost blank. Moderate spiritedness shows in ‘War Poetry’, about a school janitor’s destruction of a wasps’ nest. Then, in thirty-seven breathless lines, Clanchy gives three sentences about her grandmother: the effect is tantalising and wilfully incomplete. Next is ‘My Grandfather’, a poem so rich in non sequiturs as to be risible: “Grandad looked like old Duke Wayne/ and shot birds with the Earl of Cairn./ He had cigars and a Jaguar, and his father/ was a gas fitter. He beat us all at dominoes,/ but drew black-black one day and died./ Because of him we’re not self-made./ He left us that, Aunt Katie’s rug/ and a drawer full of cashmere socks...”. This scatterbrained approach is not so much entertaining as disabling, its energy leaking in all directions. Clanchy indulges herself in further haphazardness: ‘Act 2’ defies rational explanation, not because its vocabulary is too dense or rarefied to allow critical appraisal (it is not) but because its thrust is so weirdly arbitrary. ‘Deep Blue’ is a whimsical elegy for a friend, and ‘Record Low’ an even-more-whimsical piece about a chap who accidentally and fatally builds his toddler into a snowman. In ‘Nine Months’ she doctors language to suit a purpose which remains enigmatic: one could read it a dozen times and emerge none the wiser. In ‘Guenever’ we get: “There are no flies on Galahad/ though plenty buzz around his Dad”, which shares a dubious provenance with Wordsworth’s description of a pond in the Quantocks: “I’ve measured it from side to side:/ ‘Tis three feet long, and two feet wide”. By this stage, the fair-minded thinker wonders if this is the same Kate Clanchy about whom Helen Dunmore and Jeff Nuttal enthused in the Observer and the Independent respectively, and – if so – how she has managed to tumble from enlightenment to bathos in the space of a single volume. Could one tentatively ascribe it to folie de grandeur derived from taking too seriously the plaudits for Slattern?

     This conclusion is underscored by other poems throughout the collection. ‘Amore, Amore’ is travel verse written by an armchair tourist. It has a specious charm but is Home Counties-safe, not forged in the furnace of Sino-Soviet hardship. ‘To a Doctor’ also disappoints by ignoring consistently the need to accommodate meaning. ‘Heliograph’ salvages something worthwhile, as it stays attractively true to its subject; but ‘The Converted’ reacquaints us with a fancifulness which borders on the eccentric.

     In my first paragraph I claimed that Clanchy had already arrived.  Having read Samarkand closely, I must temper this by suggesting that her rapidly-acquired celebrity has somehow overshadowed her ability. One hopes that her aptitude will grow to fit the outsize garments which have been prematurely run up for her. Only the passage of time will further the process whereby her words become the servant of experience rather than its master. This will be expedited by ignoring the blandishments of cronies or flatterers; one suspects these have led Clanchy into Samarkand’s unedifying cul-de-sac.

     When Ian McMillan says in Poetry Review that her book is “superb” he is misguided. Such erroneous pronouncements do nothing to further the cause of poetry or poets themselves. He, and anyone else with a penchant for false approbation, should reconsider their declarations, look the Devil in the eye, and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Thereafter their reputation and that of those they evaluate will be the stronger.