"Stretch of closures" by Claire Crowther (Shearsman, 2007)

Poems from Magma, PN Review, Poetry Review, TLS etc. 90+ pages.

Here's the first of 3 stanzas from "Next Door Moon" - "The boat man is throwing Claire de Lune/ in the bin. Tiny jackets of sound/ hang on the curl of his next door moon.". The other stanzas don't help me interpret this. I wonder whether "Claire" in the poem is an allusion to the author. Maybe he's throwing her book away - "jackets" could be book jackets? The title's not helpful either.

Here's the last stanza of "Wyvern" (23 lines) - "In the days of smocks, I'd have been drunk/ from scurvy grass ale like the boys/ around Wandsworth Plain, sobering up/ on saloop, made of cuckoo flowers"". The earlier part of the poem suggests that women are less constrained by gender-roles than hitherto. Here, (as in "Parent", which would be straightforward were "gravity" not used so strangely) it seems to me that a standard plot has been poemed-up.

”Lost child” has “Planes rise/ and fall as if ground were a shaking blanket” which I don’t get, and “The small original airport building stands apart, a mother at a school gate” which I do.

”Moods” begins with “Once I had a motorway of hair, long, black, stood up to stresses well. You trafficked it” then later “Ah, motorways. We protest because they seem to lace our towns with ladders” (in what sense?) and ends with “How together we watched the uncontrollable underneath of my hair” Eh?

"Foreigners in Lecce" has "An outburst of autumn birds, like rust or falling oranges in a courtyard" Eh?

In the "Untitled" section, more poems are traditionally mainstream in their aesthetics. I can follow "Boom". "Posts" is shaped. "Glide" has "A signer opens her gate of hands       for the deaf" (shame about the in-line spaces). I can follow "Motorway Bridges" (maybe my favourite so far).

I think I get "Fail Safe" but so what? And it's prose except for the shape, which isn't worth it.

I like some of the "Forthcoming Titles" poem, though nowadays I think it would be classified as prose.

"Incense" by Claire Crowther (Flarestack, 2010)

A blindspot. Much of the time I don't get the point. When I think I do understand something, I don't much like it. These short poems often contain long info-dumps, and the short lines serve only to highlight weak phrases. My least favourites are "Ask the Heart", "Untitled" ("Ask a woman who's lost four stone/ of (mostly) fat: what's the difference?/ Capacity to jump and run?"), "The Losing Side" ("I cut, cut and forget that liposuction/ could result in a reaccumulation/ of fat that can never be as symmetrical/ as the body was pre-operatively"), "Exemplary Practice", "Recycling Guerillas" (good plot, but no poetry despite the line-breaks). "Over is Almost All of Lover" could have worked ("I've avoided naming a bomb Fat Man. I've considered variants such as Lo") but it's spoilt by the attempt to be poetic. "This Poem Must Take Clothes Off" nearly works. I liked "Rhetoric".

Other reviews

• Gill Andrews, Matt Merritt and Hilary Menos (Sphinx) (I have two fears. My first is that Claire Crowther calls these poems ‘fatras’ because the theme of the pamphlet is fat. Nice little pun, but that's about it. My second fear is that she’s actually being much cleverer than this and I’m missing something - Hilary Menos
• ‘The entire sequence is a minor revelation … she is able to locate poetry asleep in the language of science.’ David Morley (Poetry Review)