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Messages of Change, A C Clarke, 2008, Oversteps Books. £8 ISBN 978-1-9068560-1-4

Like McSheehy, A.C. Clarke is a poet of originality, depth, and quite a lot of humour as her second collection Messages of Change demonstrates (her first collection, Breathing Each Other In, was published by Blinking Eye Press in 2005). I wasn’t sure about breaking up the contents into 5 sections. This tends to raise extraneous questions, ‘Does this poem really fit the exiguous title of the section, Intimations or Towards felt light?’ There is sufficient variety and interest here, I think, to simply arrange the poems and let them flow. Clarke’s main stamping ground is human nature, its vagaries, its cruel side and its passions. Several poems are skilfully crafted – the amusing and revealing Lizard Duet, for instance, with interwoven voices of Lizard and herpetologist – and many make effective use of voice. The writing is economical but rich and we keep meeting her love of words: “corvine survivalist / on everyone’s blacklist”, “the tail springing a tassel / the folds at the edge of the mouth thrusting out tushes / the snout uncurling a trunk thick as liana”. While her interests are wide and the ‘personal’ is not the strongest note here, the depth in the collection partly derives from her marked interest in creativity (all creative artists, including her own impulse to create). Poems about a flintshaper, cathedral builders, Samuel Dow, a ropemaster, which all celebrate forms of skill and ‘making’, culminate in Listening for Orpheus, longer at 44 lines than most poems here. Possibly, but not necessarily, in the voice of Euridice, the poem invokes “the man who sang / so trees, suspending the sea-sigh of their branches, / would have lifted their roots and danced / if they could” This is a yearning poem and an exploratory poem, very freely written. Orpheus is hero, mentor, seducer, muse. I found here a poem of confident maturity, which bears re-readings; a poem we might hope to find but very rarely find in the work of lesser-knowns.