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Water to Breathe, Anne Cluysenaar, Flarestack Publishing, 2009. £3.50, ISBN 978-1-9064800-2-8

“... pure Cluysenaar – that is,
it has more riches and more
variation of content than even
her reference to ‘re-entries’
prepares us for.”

Up to her seventeenth year, when she enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, Cluysenaar led a life of many changes (Belgium, England, Scotland, England, Ireland), dictated by the war years (WW2) and by the choices of her painter father, John Cluysenaar. A short prose memoir here (after the poems) gives this history. It made me ask how changes of location, language and companions may have led tothe importance in her poetry of precisely ‘pinning down’ people and places.

Cluysenaar’s first major collection was Double Helix (Carcanet, 1982). This is a combination of Sybil Hewat’s (her mother’s) writings on family, Cluysenaar’s poems reflecting on her mother’s memoir and, amongst further poems, a potent series, Poems of Memory. The latter are vivid, moving, packed with detail. In writing these poems she may have found her first authentic poetry ‘voice’. We recognise here responsiveness, excitement, the precise grasp of particular moments in time – all strong features of her later work. The opening lines of Poems of Memory express the thrill of the process of recall: “Somewhere down the black hole / of memory, that bank of white / violets enjoys its shade, the funeral // of the boy killed on a tractor winds / through the village...”

However, in this book, Cluysenaar distinguishes between an autobiographical approach and the genesis of these new poems. These ‘erupted’ when she was focussed on another poetry project and have ‘a particular quality’ unrelated to memories she might have selected ‘in autobiographical prose’: ‘They seem to be, in Jeremy Hooker’s words, not memories at all but momentary re-entries into past life – moments which, perhaps, I would not have thought to record at all...’

This collection of thirty-six untitled poems is pure Cluysenaar – that is, it has more riches and more variation of content than even her reference to ‘re-entries’ prepares us for. As the poet infers, one of the key experiences offered is an object-lesson in re-discovering moments (in early childhood and later) presented in their freshness without contextualisation. The use of the present tense is one of the clues to the way memory is not being historicised or filtered through later reflection but moments in time swimming back into view.

In the poems relating to early memories, the angle from which objects are seen and their emotional interpretation are a young child’s: “a square / made of two hinged flaps” describes a shuttered window not yet opened; grandfather’s “body as a whole is gone, / leaving a sense of weight, / the tilt of the massive head.” We are also made aware of the child discovering her own resistance to the adult world and finding her individuality: she has stolen a blue glass vase and, denying the theft, visits it in secret, “Out of place, it sheds / on my skin a blue / stain. I’m strange / to myself. The sun / has become water...” The child now knows two worlds: her own experimental one and the adult world where the space left by the stolen vase, “delights me. The thrill of absence.”

We can appreciate in many of these poems the impact of first experiences of all kinds, including, when she is a young woman living a student life, first sexual attractions. These moments are skilfully presented without comment. Brief as they are, they capture a violent chemistry. An exchange of glances with a stranger travelling in a parallel tube-train leads to her addressing him (or us): “You remember that image, medieval, of consummation? / A blood-stained sheet hung out from the turret, / a joyful crowd at first light witnessing / the start of something that may do them good”.

This collection offers a wide-ranging insight into the key part played by apparently fleeting moments in our lives – not an academic study but one, in Cluysenaar’s words, ‘inscribed in my mental flesh’. The range of such experiences goes well beyond re-entries to childhood. It includes encounters with fellow-creatures (a trapped bird) and experiences which might be termed ‘mystical’. Like all excellent poets, Cluysenaar’s work offers fellow-poets a profound learning experience. In this collection she offers a way of approaching memory which avoids the deadness of nostalgia.