"Selected Poems” by Kate Clanchy (Picador, 2014)

Poems from Ambit, Magma, Poetry Review, Rialto, etc. collected from her 3 books - "Slattern", "Samarkand" and "Newborn".

First, some generalisations -

• In "Speculation", an eclipse is due - a dark "counter for the highest stakes" is about to slide over a brighter one. The persona's been told for safety's sake to watch backwards, in a mirror. This is compared to a relationship - "I thought of how it is with us - I stare, you turn away and flush." So the title refers to predictions about love as well as about gambling and the eclipse. Like many of her pieces, it's an extended metaphor.
• "Speculation" is 4 5-lined stanzas. Like most of her poems, it's made of equally sized rectangles. In this well-crafted poem I think the stanza-breaks are significant, as are many of the line-breaks. Hoever, most of the poems have fairly arbitrary shapes - line-breaks have to be ignored otherwise they're distracting. "Mendings" for example is printed as 22 short-lined triplets, but could have been couplets or prose.
• She's good at snapshots of relationships - the poems on p.18-21 capture moments. And there are moving (or soppy) soundbites - "Patagonia" ends with "When I spoke of Patagonia, I meant// skies all empty aching blue. I meant/ years. I meant all of them with you."
• "Grace Ethel must have heard it fall/ and thrash: a rush like love, at first,/ then a nagging, migrainous pulse,/ then a flutter like a faulty value/ in the chimney's hidden ventricle" (p.68, about finding a bird's skeleton up a chimney). There are many things "like love" in the book, even if they're not labelled as such.
• In my comments on 'Samarkand' that I wrote in 1999, I ended with "If she started writing short stories I fear her poetry production might cease." Maybe I had in mind poems like "The Bridge Over the Border" which starts with "Here, I should surely think of home -/ my country and the neat steep town/ where I grew up: its banks of cloud,/ the winds and changing, stagey light,/ its bouts of surly, freezing rain, or failing that,// the time the train stuck here half an hour./ It was hot, for once"
• Many of the poems from "Newborn" deal with situations common to new parents, situations that are often written about. All of the poems have something to say, but I don't think it always needs a whole poem/page to say it. The first ultrasound scan of the foetus is often awe-inspiring for parents, and poem-inspiring for poets. It's hard to believe there's anything new to say on the topic. "Scan" doesn't do a bad job considering, but it doesn't do enough. An exception is "Miscarriage, Midwinter" (a companion piece to "One, Two"), where a mother is playing with her toddler outside - "For weeks we've been promised/ snow ... I'm trying to scrape/ some together, to mould just/ the head of the world's smallest/ snowman, but it's too cold/ and it powders like ash in my hand"

Now some miscellaneous comments -

• I like "Slattern" and "Raspberries" (a loose sonnet) most
• I like "the child who trailed her sister like a slow-to-take-off kite" (p.56)
• I can see that some poems have more to them than I can comprehend. "Deep Blue" for example, may have allusions to "The Seventh Seal". I know that a famous chess computer was called "Deep Blue", and the poem is dedicated to John Blau (i.e. Blue).
• I like "you/ are putting me on, easily,/ the way a foot puts on a shoe" ("One, Two"). The persona is a woman sensing her ten-celled embryo.