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Travellers Without Baggage, Valerie Clarke, 2008, Two Ravens Press. £8.99 ISBN 978-1-9061203-8-2

Valerie Clarke’s, Travellers Without Baggage was ready for the press when she died in 2008 and thus becomes her poetic legacy – a good, solid one and a tribute to the way she worked at her poetry. I remember her at one workshop taking the line that ‘I write what I see. I can’t invent’. This ‘downrightness’ is a factor in the book, but mainly a positive one. We begin to appreciate a relentless honesty and the trust it creates. She is particularly good on travel in countries where the welcome is ambiguous, such as Russia – good at letting the facts speak for themselves. This is also true of her powerful sequence, Living, 1956, a poem composed of six sonnets about a seduction followed by desertion: “Where dark has settled make it light / let fur, let teeth and eyes become morning, / those mutterings of tart and bastard, slut / she must not believe in. From him nothing / he doesn’t write or phone.” Harsh truth-telling is leavened, in any case, in this varied collection. Clarke had a keen interest in form: prose poems, sonnets, sestinas, and poems written in couplets add variety. She also indulges a vein of fantasy, for example in her poem Interviewing Eve (of Adam-and-Eve fame) and addressing a vampire, “What other needs than blood do vampires have?” and imagining wolves invading London (Christmas with Wolves). In Veari Mahsa she uses legend to chill effect, “Never your brother, this creature turning to stone / in your arms on the bank of a soundless river.” Rightly or wrongly, Veari Mahsa is linked in my mind with a group of poems which may relate to her protracted
illness and focus on the lone hours of the night. “I sweat out the hours, / pushing back covers, not fully asleep / or awake. Where are you? This cry seeking / something, someone, as though earth / was
yearning for rain, the blood for oxygen” (Owl at midnight)... “Tonight’s dream / tells me to comb / the sea until / she’s flat and grey” (Message)... “The suspense of wakefulness. Unable to / sink into, dive under ... I freeze among bare-knuckled shadows” (Box Lined with Black Velvet)... “I’m sick and sleep on my own, / coughing. // Inhospitable mattress, insufferable pillows – / I toss, and spit phlegm” (Dreamlines). These poems are down-to-earth, not self-pitying, but effectively take us to the edge.