reviews – Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Annie Fisher, Missing the Man Next Door, Mariscat Press, £9
Kath McKay, Moving the Elephant, The Garlic Press, £10
Claire Crowther, Real Lear: New & Selected Poems, Shearsman Books, £12.95

Fans of Annie Fisher know that her poetry of the everyday – serious, entertaining, sometimes bordering on outlandish – is handsomely crafted. Even on a first breeze through the 24 poems of her new pamphlet, the variety is evident: of form, length, type and subject matter. There are couplets, tercets, blocks, prose-poems, list-poems, an unrhymed sonnet and more, encompassing, as before, high seriousness, nonsense verse and fantasy. What is constant throughout is Fisher’s voice: droll, mischievously cynical and worldly-wise.

The title-theme is introduced cleverly in a poem entitled ‘The New Neighbour’, whose anonymous character has succeeded ‘John / who died in the pandemic at the age of ninety-four — // John, to whom I never said goodbye, / who’ll always be, for me, the man next door.’ John is elegised at fuller length in the title poem, a list-poem full of delightful closely-observed memories:

I liked that he was there.
I liked the way he sang Italian arias off-key.
I liked how every time he tottered to the corner shop
for bread and beans, he’d ping our metal gate post
with his stick, then nod and smile to hear the note it made
as if was his tuning fork.

Fisher’s use of anaphora here surely bestows extra poignancy to her moving recollections.

Another, pleasurable list-poem, this time verging on nonsense verse (to which it states its debt), itemises what the title, ‘A Few Favourite Things’, indicates, including ‘naked swimming, hugging trees, / Seamus Heaney, Scotsmen’s knees’.

A handful of nature-themed poems include one about the critically-endangered shoebill and a lovely short poem, ‘The Old Beech by the Lychgate’, which deserves to be in every anthology of tree poetry: ‘It’s unembarrassed if we talk out loud. / It’s just as fine with nothing being said.’ That half-rhyme adds to the poem’s four full rhymes. Full rhyme is seemingly scarce nowadays but Fisher is adept at using it to winning effect in light verse which bears comparison to Lear or Nash:

The Parson’s goldfish is godlier than God,
His piranha is pious as well,
But the Parson himself is a wicked old sod,
Who’s probably going to hell.

(‘The Improbable Perfections of the Parson’s Pets’)

The clerical theme continues overleaf (and not, alas, opposite) in one of the pamphlet’s two highpoints, ‘Priests’. Its eight tercets reflectively address the good and the bad in what might be the definitive poem on the subject:

Some were demons. Some were saints.
One (dear Father Clement) was an angel.
They starved for lack of ordinary love.

Here, as throughout, Fisher turns skilfully on a sixpence from the generic to the specific and back again.

The pamphlet ends with the other highpoint, ‘The Old Dancing Woman of Bridgwater Town’, a luscious, celebratory whirl, using ballad meter, of Fisher’s own Somerset roots:

and she’s dancing through Northfield and Springfield and Oakfield,
she’s dancing down East Quay and Westover Green
and on through the back streets, the dark streets, the drunk streets
where only Houdini the alley cat’s been.

Occasionally, Fisher’s flights of fancy – ones involving R.S. Thomas and Jesus for example – feel like filler, but on the whole this is another rich assortment from a poet whose mastery of comic verse shouldn’t blind readers to her ability to write, additionally, and at times simultaneously, profound, re-readable poetry.

Kath McKay’s third full collection, like its predecessors, reflects her life story: a working-class Liverpool-Irish childhood, university in Belfast at the height of the ‘Troubles’, and adulthood, teaching in London, Leeds and Hull, parenting and grandparenting. It runs chronologically, right up to the pandemic and beyond, and the poems are almost always comprised of personal vignettes.

McKay’s style doesn’t set off fireworks; at their best, though, the poems in Moving the Elephant are, well, moving. The staccato clauses of an elegy for her mother, ‘I Know that the Science of Genetics’, say much with little:

[. . .] I fifth in your belly,
one dead at a year, three more to come, and you

lapped milk and fed me potatoes and bread, so that
when women go on about chocolate, I say, Give me
potatoes and bread.’

Two successive poems deftly celebrate the optimism of McKay and her Sixties cohort’s aspirations:

In spring, Harold Wilson told our sixth form, ‘You will go far.’
A lad asked about the White Heat of Technology. Next Day
over the law on the conservation of mass, the chemistry teacher

we felt sorry for, in her glasses and bun, curbed our giggles:
‘In the modern world, everyone will need a knowledge of chemistry.’
The Physics teacher had ‘Leaving the Tao’ written on his door.

(‘Leaving the Tao’)

‘Youse girls, says Nelly. ‘Get yourselves an education. Get out of here.’

(‘Saturday Job’)

The range of subject matter is diverse, covering: learning Spanish, Catholicism, political activism, working in a jam factory (‘How to switch my mind off, but keep enough residual attention / in case something untoward like a dead spider or a decapitated mouse / ended up in the jam’), secondhand clothing, Captain Webb, moving house (the title poem), a 77-year-old milkman, a visit to a chiropodist, soup-making, strong women and much else; but it is the poems about family which are arguably the most captivating. ‘The Other Room’, second-person tercets presumably about the death of McKay’s mother, contains the tenderest of moments, ‘you note / that your mother is growing colder, but still, you want to cuddle her / in case something of her is still floating round, lost.’ Somehow, the punctuating repetition of ‘still’, albeit used in differing ways, heightens the emotion.

The collection feels over-stuffed; 61 poems is excessive, given their lack of formal variety. In particular, six successive travelogues (set in Russia, Australia x 2, Italy and Spain x 2) midway through the book feels like a few too many, like that old trope of the neighbours showing you their holiday snaps with an implicit ‘you had to be there’ hanging in the air. The best is ‘Black Tea and Lemon’, because its tale is the quirkiest: ‘All night on the train between Moscow and Krasnodar, / Michael cracked the shells of boiled eggs and popped in thirteen.’

Heartfelt though all the poems in the book are, they don’t quite often enough include surprising lines or metaphors/similes, or portray incidents out of leftfield – a poem resulting from donation of her late brother’s eyes is a notable exception and shows exactly what McKay is capable of.

I was left with an abiding memory of two consecutive poems, both of which stand out precise because of their formal difference and (appear to) concern the death of McKay’s partner at just 56: ‘Unremarkable’, a very much remarkable list poem in which the condition of his body parts is itemised – ‘Liver shows evidence of nutmeg congestion’ – and ‘The Other Side’, seven couplets, but not a sonnet, which unflashily and touchingly convey the zombie-like autopilot nature of bereavement – ‘I boiled a kettle I’d forgotten to fill. Left the toast // to burn. Told the kids, their faces stricken, I was going shopping.’

Claire Crowther’s poetry is considerably more complex than Fisher’s or McKay’s. This retrospective drawn from her five collections from 2007 to 2022, plus 23 new poems, therefore demands patience on the reader’s part. In a 2009 interview, in response to the question of how closely Crowther drew on her own experiences, she said:

In a way I always do but only as a starting point. I have always felt what I write about – that’s the genesis of a poem. But the detail varies from my own experience – it could be that I observe other families interacting and freely bring in their details. I never feel I have to stick to any one set of facts – I mingle and match facts I’ve observed to serve the poem which becomes something different. In the end, there is rarely any autobiography at all – the poem has taken over completely.[1]

The innate questions of this mix’n’match approach are whether the effort required to try to locate the emotional heart, and the point, of each poem justifies the time spent. I confess that my first read-through was challenging and that the poems – or, rather, some of them – only came alive on a second reading. Perhaps that is a good thing – like music whose depths only reveal themselves over several listenings.

The first poem, has a forbidding, if not off-putting, title, ‘Reconstructive Fortress’, but concerns one of those life-changing events: the process of selling a property, a flat in central London, and the feelings it evokes. The short sentences of the poem’s middle stanza follow each other in an almost disassociative, dark-humoured manner:

I’ve been wearing this flat for too long.
It’s dark though I’ve accessorised it in turquoise.
It works best when my skin is palest in winter.
In summer, it makes me look tacky. I am ready
to invest in a house as well-fitted as a bra.
None of that faux leopard skin, no balconettes.

A later, charming companion piece of sorts, ‘Fennel’ takes a strange turn: ‘The new owners may scrape the taste of my house / off its surface, but her fennel seeds cranny in fissures / and plan a dynasty of yellow tang.’

The subject-matter of the early poems is as happily varied as Crowther’s syntax is elegant. ‘Lost Child’, one of several poems set in Solihull, unspools its curious tale over six couplets, ending beautifully: ‘Pearl was playing quietly alone. / My ear is like a shell the wind swept.’ ‘Nudists’ opens with a killer line, ‘In the home of the naked, glass is queen’; as does ‘Foreigners in Lecce’: ‘Home is rind-hard’. The 23 five-line stanzas of ‘Against the Evidence’ unfold a short story largely also set in and around Lecce, and the phrases of which needs to be slowly savoured:

Saturday. Lemon of winter. Damp charcoal
bramble. Grey quilts of cloud. Wind tumbles
the wrapping from our ciabatta as if future
is the rim of a beaten country
and we’ve reached it. [. . .]

‘Once Troublesome’ begins as a fine Twixmas poem – ‘It isn’t New Year yet so Happy What? / Till then, it’s Boxing Day every morning.’ – then veers off with Crowther’s trademark odd turns. ‘Live Grenade in Sack of Potatoes Story’ is weighed down by its title’s promise.

A number of poems revolve around ‘thikes’, creatures imagined by Crowther, again in Hob’s Moat, Solihull: ‘The number of thikes / casually shot is high. / Celebrities on Channel Five News / have endorsed the policing of thike-baiters.’ (‘The Thike). Whether it’s a metaphor for marginalised groups, or even the position of women, within British society isn’t entirely clear, but it gives Crowther licence to play:

It’s not because I’m dirty
It’s not because I’m clean
It’s not because I kissed a thike
inside a space machine

(‘Sleeping on a Trampoline’)

That playfulness is evident elsewhere, such as a punning riff on her forename in the whackily entitled ‘Self-Portrait as Windscreen’:

Do you think I’m clear on every issue
just because I’m glass?
Have you heard yourself calling ‘Claire,

Claire, Claire, Claire’ when you’re confused?
A name is lulling
when you aren’t clear on every issue.

It’s tempting to intuit that that last line is a knowing, self-aware thought that her poetry is not of the transparent kind.

The difficulty quotient is ratcheted up further in Crowther’s fourth collection, Solar Cruise, which explores, via the metaphor of a cruise ship, the world of solar physics inhabited by her partner, Keith Barnham. Yet, among the scientific jargon, these poems are among the book’s most enjoyable, largely because we find Crowther at play again: ‘A sheen of fog curtains our balcony / and into that the captain sends a throaty // ohhhhm // ohhhhm // ohhhhm’ (‘Foghorn with Solar Harvester’). She satirises the domineering men of that world and celebrates the women whose achievements ought to be better known. One poem, ‘Electricity Generation in Germany in a Typical April week’, incorporates a graph showing the relative amounts of solar, wind and conventional power generated. There are further physics-related poems in her fifth collection, and curious others, including a love poem and a (cod?) metaphysical one:

              Now we are over, death
has nuanced our model of dead worlds.
Indeed, as some poet mentioned,
pearl is mere pavement here
              and no one dead mourns.

(‘Heaven is Nothing If Not Resolution’)

The final section, Real Lear, reimagines Lear as a woman, and includes some delicious gobbledygook, in particular in the nature poem, ‘Gabbery’:

every dry battletwig
scuttles under tubbans
a dunnock in the hedgeskips
sings to her nestling:

cuculus cuculus
gowk in my hidland
gabber in my hidland
o fierce cuculus

This intriguing seam has also recently been mined to great effect by Geraldine Clarkson, in her collection Medlars. Poetry to be enjoyed purely for its soundscape reaches an apogee for Crowther in the book’s final poem, ‘Soundsunder’:

     [. . .] I hear inside my silence

that it is the sussuround of us
we other:
sounds that shushhush the our of self

In reading such a generous selection of Crowther’s poetry, it becomes a struggle to know when she is making serious points and what they are. The density of her writing, albeit often exquisitely crafted in musical lines, inhibits simple, or simplistic, exegesis and therefore prohibits much in the way of an emotional reaction other than a degree of frustration and, inasmuch as one can judge the tone, a wry smile at the fun Crowther appears to be having, as if one isn’t quite allowed in on the joke. Surely, though, kernels of clarity are gradually revealed over multiple re-readings.

[1] Interview with Andrew Philip, https://tonguefire.blogspot.com/2009/07/open-plan-otherness-interview-with.html, accessed 23 November 2024.

Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Tag: reviews

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Reviews of Annie Fisher, Kath McKay and Claire Crowther