"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.

“How to grow your own poems” by Kate Clanchy (Picador, 2020)

A poetry workbook which also addresses practical and psychological inhibitors.

I like the first exercise - some poems are presented, templates are abstracted from them, and the reader is invited to fill them in given the right amount of help. The aim is to show how life's details (that the reader might have dismissed as unpoetic) can be added to poems - a good way to tempt people in. The examples are mostly list poems. Some results are shown, written by youths.

She warns people not to use rhyme initially ("because they are rare, rhymes in English are loud"). She points out that it's ok to borrow in some way from other poems - "Poetry, in short, until very recently, was a varied, noisy, general conversation, not a silent solo art form. It's easier to join in a conversation than it is to make a speech". She points out that "Poets are very drawn to [gerunds]. They do nice poetic things. They still the action. They suit a contemplative turn of mind. They rhyme (with each other). They give you an iambic (ta-tum) beat. But they can also have a cloying, clogging effect" (p.58)

After lists, she looks at voltas between lists. She's keen about involving the five senses, about using concrete rather than abstract nouns. Throughout the book, many of the poems use anaphora.

She writes "Personally, I have never seen the point [of syllabics]" (p.153) and "Most published contemporary poets, though, don't just use conventional punctuation at all times, but are quite obsessed with it" (p.164)

I think the only poem that doesn't demonstrate the point she's trying to make is "My Beast" - she writes that "the square stanzas ... trap us in a regular shape" but the lines don't all have similar lengths, and 2 of the stanzas are run-on.

I noticed

• "Love like Windows 95/ The greatest, most user-friendly Windows of them all/ Those four little panes of light/ Like the stained glass of an ancient church/ vibrating in the sunlit rubble/ of the twentieth century" (from "Love comes back" by Hera Lindsay Bird)
• "The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver
• "Not the furniture game" (Simon Armitage) has many good images
• "That landing strip with no runway lights/ where you are aiming your plane,/ imagining a voice in the tower,/ imagining a tower" (from "My heart" by Kim Addonizio)
• "Chair" by Sally Davis
• The most beautiful part of your body is wherever your mother's shadow falls ... Your dead friends passing/ through you like wind/ through a wind chime" (from "Someday I'll love Ocean Vuong" by Ocean Vuong)

I think the book's prime audience is [teachers of] people new to poetry - many beginners' errors/assumptions" are directly challenged, and the "fill in the gaps" approach to writing provides an easy route in. I suppose the number of list/anaphora poems is a consequence of this accessibility.

Other reviews

• Teo Eve (more suitable for beginner poets than anyone already well-versed in the form)
• Kate Sotejeff-Wilson
• Harry Cochrane (Generally, though, there is very little holding forth across the book’s seven chapters, which share a broadly similar structure. Here’s a poem; here’s what it’s doing; here’s a prompt; now it’s your turn. ... As a primer, the book is still a little too primary school, appealing to our poetic instinct but to none of our curiosity. It makes no apologies for its classroom origins, however, and in the classroom it will find its true calling.)

"Samarkand" by Kate Clanchy (Picador, 1999)

There are

• short poems ("The Invisible Man", etc)
• medium poems that take a simile and pad out the vehicle and tenor ("War Poetry", etc), or pad out another simple structure ("To a Lawyer", "The Rich"). Few of these are successful: some are weak.
• long poems which begin mundanely then take off two-thirds of the way through with varying success ("Record Low", etc)
• some "so what" poems of various lengths (especially at the start of "The NewHome cabaret" section). "Content" sounds like extracts from a short story summary, the final lines quoting those of the story.

Scattered amongst these are better pieces. They tend to be about a page long - she needs a long runway. There's a whole US magazine devoted to angel poetry, so I doubt whether the subject matter of "With Angels" is new. "The Acolyte" and "Conquest" both deal with idealised relationships using extended metaphors with greater success than usual. The poetry worth buying works out to about 70p a page. The book may indeed be "both a darker and a more sunlit collection than its predecessor", but I don't think it's as good. If she started writing short stories I fear her poetry production might cease.