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

Kate Clanchy’s first collection, Slattern, established her as a wholly distinctive poet. The poems are remarkable for their warmth, their affection for men in general and their passion for particular men, their lack of defensive irony or bitterness which has become common when writing about the opposite sex. Many of the poems are quietly erotic, and where there is humour it is gentle: the boots bought by two men friends are

     high-sided butch-toed things,
with untied thongs and lolling tongues.
                                       (The Pair of Them)

As this shows, Clanchy has an assured control of sound values as well as of double meanings.

A second collection is often the most difficult. The poet has to decide whether to continue with the tried-and-tested or to extend his/her range. In Samarkand, Clanchy has chosen the latter, with variable results.

The poems in the first third of the book lack emotional pressure. There is an elegy, poems about grandparents, two long narratives about the deaths of small children in France and Tasmania, an epigram about Wells’ The Invisible Man. In each case, the poet’s resources are not fully engaged. This leads to flat writing:

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.
                                                 (My Grandfather)

and to a number of false notes: in To Travel, the poem from which the book’s title is taken,

From here. the fields of Oxfordshire
stretch already sovereign-golden.

(sovereign-golden? a coin not in use for eighty years?); a strained attempt to connect a dislodged wasps’ nest with Wilfred Owen’s poems (War Poetry); the suggestion that swallows’ cries sound like police sirens (Burglar Alarm, E1); an uncomfortably punning title (The Currs); most unconvincingly, Hometime, which reads in full:

When my grandfather died he saw,
he said, not Death’s bare head, but aunts,
his antique aunts in crackling black,
come to call him back from play.

There is a struggle for emotional weight without the resources to achieve it.

Fortunately the book recovers with With Angels, the first of thirteen poems offering various takes on the theme of love. With Angels is a clear dispassionate account of the difficulties of making love with an angel, coming to the conclusion that the only practical option is fellatio:

               And as he shook and looked
to God, one hand vague on your nodding head,
would he weep, the way men do,
but pearls, or hard smalt angel tears?

The poem is remarkable not only for its wit and its realism in a non-realistic context (“one hand vague on your nodding head”), but also for its acceptance of male desire even in angels. It is the most original, indeed the most brilliant, poem in the book and deserves to appear in every future anthology of love poetry.

In fact, it is the first of three modern views of male archetypes, the others being the man on a pedestal (The Acolyte) and the knight in shining armour (Guinever). Unlike Carol Ann Duffy’s Mrs series, the viewpoint is one of acceptance. In the first, the woman hauls Tupperware containers of food and drink up to Simeon Stylites and prostrates herself at the foot of the column; in the second, the woman prefers the experienced Lancelot with his rusting armour to the thrusting narcissistic Galahad.

Gradually the artfulness of the poems’ order becomes apparent. Guinever is followed by an extreme romantic fantasy of following home to the Altai Republic in Mongolia a man who has learnt Italian from operas (Amore, amore). This is followed by the unromantic realism of a man with herpes (The Personals) and a wonderfully sardonic poem about trying to start a relationship with a doctor (To a Doctor).

Two more poems on failing relationships (Speculation and Raspberries) lead surprisingly to two imitations of John Donne, as if the poet is seeking reassurance that it is still possible to write poems that both are intelligent and express unconditional love. This quality of unconditional love is then presented through images of the poet as explorer (Conquest) and as religious fanatic:

I shall go out, and proselytise for Love,
trail through the streets with a handcart of tracts,
stop in positions of maximum nuisance -
in chainstore doorways, station forecourts...
                                                     (The Converted)

The last poem of the sequence, by contrast, is quiet and direct, imaging the achieving of love as the climbing of a peak through mist. This poem, Content, introduces the book’s final sequence which celebrates the poet’s setting up home with her partner. I can’t think of any other poems that render both the effort of hard work - stripping walls, digging up old lino, removing hardboard, coping with the dust - and the intimacy to which it leads: the sloping floor that

                           will send
me on my office chair swivelling back
to meet your arms
                                        (Upon No. 30)

a heavy mirror at last hung:

I shut my eyes and feel the weight
go from me. You pull back my arm
and show me us. Fixed-up, framed,
hands clasped and raised - the Amolfinis
at a football match.
                                      (The Mirror)

The sexual undertow is definite (it takes a particular cast of mind to associate the trade names of the 50s cooker and sink - NewHome Cabaret and Leisure - with undressing), but discreet. Beyond it, the poems declare, fairly uniquely these days, the joy of setting up home with someone. This is triumphantly expressed in the last poem of the sequence, The Tree, in which every image - the apples on the garden tree, the ceremonial highway, the dynamo on the homecoming partner’s bike, the lights going on (“the gold of bulbs”, “ingots / of a hall, back bedroom, stair’) expresses celebration, in contrast with a girl on a train, “her finger / twisted round the rucksack packed / with everything she owns”. Whether the poet’s younger self or the partners former girlfriend (or both), the contrast makes explicit the richness of a shared home as against a nomadic existence.

The book’s last poem, Present, is a summation of both the love poems and the home-making sequence. Like Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings, the subject is a train journey through a realistically described landscape, but instead of a sardonic outsider’s view lifted at the end by an unexpectedly beautiful image, Present expresses delight in everything seen, from “blazered boys on platforms / blowing smoke rings bright as haloes” and “the one / hand-fasted couple, their flowered acne / and pram” [note how “flowered” works to redeem the disfigurement] to a burst water main:

the top droplets golden in the lamp,
a flood of unstoppable coins.

The poem enacts the pleasure of recounting what the poet has seen to her partner, as one does at the end of a day, so that the final image of filling one’s pockets with coins - as moments remembered, recounted and enjoyed - is integral to the poem, not soldered on.

Space prevents discussion of the formal qualities of Clanchy’s work, such as the frequent echo effects as in the last quotation above. Her combination of directness and musicality is very appealing but, above all, Samarkand confirms her as an extraordinary poet, modern and completely unsentimental, of Larkin’s “much-mentioned brilliance” - love in all its guises.

Thirst is Matthew Caley’s first full-length collection. By chance, Samarkand appears twice in it, again as an image of the exotically remote. In one of them as the poet imagines plunging into a laburnum

                          to emerge
somewhere between Tulse Hill and Samarkand.
                                    (Bending under the laburnum)

It is typical of Caley that this has Blakean conviction rather than bathos. One of his many skills is effortlessly to adopt the styles of other writers and make them his own. There are brilliant imitations of John Berryman and Marianne Moore, also an Audenesque speech by the ultimate capitalist (Lord Hanson, Reclining) and more than a hint of Frank O’Hara in Ellsworth Kelly: Orange Red Relief.

Caley also has a quicksilver ability to change tone within a poem, moving assuredly between grandiloquence, literary allusion and throwaway one-liners. In Blackout, a joyously freewheeling account of waking up drunk, the poem moves from the Three Fates to a bed:

My wrist bracelet bore the legend- Neil Bymouth

(get it?) to Troy (“Someone projected the shadow / of a grazing horse on the side of a lit-up bell tent”) to a rhododendron glade (“ A rhododendron / is a bush with six equal sides”) to a meeting with La Belle Dame Sans Merci (later “A cold bird burbled / in the sedge”) via Wim Wenders’ angels to a Bacchic, perhaps Panic, conclusion:

                    The horns of a hangover
were growing through my skull.
I stood up and went out to get mortal.

A subtler example is Ellsworth Kelly: Orange Red Relief where the collocation of a painting and New York alerts us to the tone, both rapt and demotic, of Frank O’Hara:

Where so much is suggested by the curve of a line
that the heart drops but is held aloft by coolness.

This modulates to a brief description of New York:

                      the way
Central Park sits like a green scarf
dropped on a snowy but thawing New York
by a madman hurrying to his loft

where the last line is a nod to the bedlamite in To Brooklyn Bridge by Hart Crane, another of Caley’s avatars. The poem moves on to a quotation from “distinguished historian Simon Shamen” - a mocking reference to Simon Schama though I don’t know why shaman in misspelled - to end with delicate rendering of death-in-life:

                      Take your life there.
Have your skull trepanned by a huge slice of light.

All the allusions are held together in an obliquely witty, wholly satisfying way.

Caley is also a master of form, capable of turning out a sestina (Bespoke Tailors), but more usually working in varied line-lengths with sparkling internal rhymes and echoes, as in haiku / fuck you / Jacko in Love Poem : Final Demand and this, from Here and There which is about the Goncourt Brothers:

having the nerve
to bitch
about Saint-Beuve (having the itch).
Given the urge they could be an ur-Gilbert and George.

Given such skills, brilliantly deployed, of allusion, wit, tone and form, it is somewhat surprising that reading Thirst is finally a melancholy experience. It expresses a longing for transcendence - longed for but not achieved - so palpable that it hurts. This is best demonstrated from the fairly frequent poems about sex and drink.

It is not so much that the poems about sex are bleak - there are unfunny poems about masturbation (Onanist) and a voyeuristic landlord (Theme and Variation) - but that they associate sex with death. In Three Part Harmony, a window cleaner falls to his death from watching a couple coupling in the bath. How to sleep with a woman is a creepy description of burgling a house to lie naked with a woman who is “laid out for you like a burial mound” but not touch her. This Once Great Ladies Man describes a retreat from sexual contact (“He had settled, at last, settled / like dust, for less”). Most plangently, White Noise imagines having sex in Brockwell Park with a figure from the cultural past, a

            stand-in Jeanne Duval,
Miss Lemur... gammy-legged sitter
for Manet, de-camped to Brixton for a spell.

But the illusion of love-making does not last:

                my perfect metre,
her feather-boa sprightly as a firework. It peters out...

and he is left

My hooped, pale arms all
hooped on nothing but a hangover...

It was a drunken dream, after all. As in his rejection of Lady Ottoline Morrell (Aloof), transcendence is not to be achieved with women, which brings us to the issue of drink. Apart from its ambiguous title, Thirst has two slightly defiant epigraphs about drunkenness and this is a frequent theme of the poems. Blackout and Drunks waking see the sun are freewheeling but astutely patterned accounts of being drunk. In the beautifully written Bending under the laburnum, transcendence is envisaged by plunging drunk into the tree. Later poems are more dour. There are wistful meditations on two famously drunken writers, Malcolm Lowry (The worm in the bottom of the mescal bottle) and Hart Crane (The Hangover Dream). Most direct is Fallen Seraph which ends

A table is a table is a table
though somehow the drink I’m drinking
                                                 by miraculous osmosis
is igniting the top of that lime tree.
I shall drink more and illuminate the century.

A hard drinking (and misogynistic) seeker-after-truth might be a convincing pose for a man, like Caley, in his 30s - less so in his 50s and beyond, one suspects - but to see alcohol as a source of inspiration, rather than as an adjunct to it, seems, shall we say, problematic. This interpretation might seem unfair were it not for the last poem in the book, the poet’s final words so far. Called The Masters and the Trees, it expresses the poet’s view that even the masters of writing were unable to render what they see in words:

                     The flaw being that nothing
could solve
the discrepancy between the vision and the thing

itself: the treeness of a tree
or the wordiness of words.

This reads like a counsel of despair. Caley gives the impression of someone with immense verbal skills who has lost the power to render experience in visionary terms. ‘Lost’ is the word because his earliest poems, such as the Brixton sonnets published in Dog magazine in 1994, were among the finest urban-visionary poems I have ever seen. I wish him a speedy recovery.