Delicious tensions, Clare Best's End of Season/Fine di stagione

Clare Best’s new project, End of Season/Fine di stagione (Frogmore Press, 2022), is a delicious portrayal of the tensions that run through life, yoking them to poetry so as to burrow down to the core of feelings.

To start with, as indicated by the title itself, there are linguistic tensions, each poem in English placed on the opposite page to its corresponding piece in Italian (written by Franca Mancinelli and John Taylor). Rather than translations, these feel like two independent texts that establish dialogues: views of Italy in English, then also in Italian but filtered through an English perspective. Languages, cultures and societies rub up against each other and generate further insight into how we view the world around us.

And then another inherent semantic tension exists in that title. The end of a season hints at the end of a cycle, wondering and worrying about what might lie beyond, the past providing a counterpoint to the present as in the following extract from ‘Return’…

If I forget these short days
and cool nights, the lack
of screaming swifts,
I can pretend today is summer
and we are here together…

In End of Season/Fine di stagione, Clare Best provides an acute reminder that the acts of writing and reading reconcile us with ourselves, Throughout these poems, she explores this process, leading up to ‘On the Mulattiera’, which delicately brings the past and the present back together…

…There was a time I couldn’t have left you.
I’m there, I’m here. The road’s collapsed.

Where have I been? My path – October
wood-smoke, pine cones fallen on rubble.

You let me go and then I let you go.
I never loved you well enough till now.

Fractured sky opens into rain.
What can it mean to be here, alone…?

And one final implicit tension in End of Season/Fine di stagione is between the written page and song, as six of these poems have been set to music by Amy Crankshaw (you can watch the first performance for yourself on YouTube here). It’s well worth comparing the versions, as they cast a fresh perspective on each other.

End of Season/Fine di stagione shows us (yet again!) Clare Best’s unquenchable thirst for collaborations with other genres, all tied to her drive to explore experience via hard-won artistic creativity, taking us along for the ride, allowing us to reflect too on the tensions within our own lives. This is the sort of writing that earns new readers for poetry, bringing it into settings and contexts where it is too often absent. Clare Best never lives in a bubble. She’s forever reaching out to people and that’s a terrific virtue.

Grappling with love, Clare Best's Each Other

Titles sometimes fall flat or don’t quite represent the book that follows. However, the title of Clare Best second full collection, Each Other (Waterloo Press, 2019), certainly does so, as the poems are riven with duality.

First of all, the book is divided into two sections. Moon House evokes the dynamics in relationships between two people: wife and husband, daughter and mother, mother and son, son and father, grandson and grandfather, and in doing so it seems explicitly autobiographical. Each Other, however, appears far more fictionalised, portraying the evolution of an imagined couple.

Secondly, while the two sections might initially give the impression of being separate entities, the crux of this collection lies in their implicit dialogue. In order to get to grips with the terms of that conversation, it’s worth comparing their technical qualities.

Let’s start with Moon House. In this section, Clare Best captures and treasures moments. She’s explicitly personal, as in the ending to My father-in-law embraces my son:

…The love between you overwhelms the dream.

You both bristle with light,

I’ve never seen love as bright as this.

I must wake up and find my son, tell him

how much his grandfather loves him.

The love, the love. I will hurry now.

Love isn’t just invoked in these lines. Instead, it becomes a chant, being defined and redefined.

There are many instances throughout Moon House where Best, far from fearing this abstract noun, meets it head-on and wrestles with its potential connotations. As a consequence, Each Other (the collection’s second section) then comes as a shock.

In Each Other, most of the poems are driven by anecdote and observation. One excellent example can be found in the opening lines of What they depend on…

She believes in miracles, education, cotton sheets.

            He prefers wool socks, a tidy desk, blue cheese.

She swears by scent, candles, unexpected sex.

            He likes promises, weekends, knowing what’s next…

The casual reader might well be disconcerted by the juxtaposition of these two approaches in a single volume. Nevertheless, further inspection of the collection gradually reveals its cohesive nature. In fact, the poet’s skill is such that she is convincingly able to employ contrasting techniques and then let them play off each other (sic).

To explain this concluding statement, let’s go back to that afore-mentioned implicit dialogue between the two sections. Similarity and difference, definition and description, the abstract and the concrete, are all harnessed, inviting us to join Clare Best in her grappling with one specific term that also just happens to be this excellent book’s final word: love.

Clare Best's The Missing List

Rogue Strands rarely ventures beyond poetry, but today’s an exception due to Clare Best’s prose memoir, The Missing List (Linen Press, 2018). This post isn’t a review as such, just a few reflections on her book.

Clare Best is perhaps best known for her fine poetry, so it’s worth making a general point that also applies to this text in particular: many reviewers lapse into erroneous critical shorthand when excellent poets lend their hand to prose, invoking terms such as “lyrical” or “poetic”. In fact, the signs of a successful shift of genre are far more subtle.

For example, an assured poet knows how to capture a scene via a layering effect, building up seemingly insignificant details until they explode into meaning. Clare Best manages just such an effect in many scenes throughout The Missing List. Moreover, a poet is also an expert in telling their narrative via a collage of perspectives and moments, having learnt how to place trust in their reader, allowing connections to be made organically. Clare Best shows her mastery of the technique in The Missing List.

The subject matter of this book is childhood sexual abuse, which again lends itself to more critical shorthand such as “harrowing” or “moving”. However, the author’s achievement lies in involving the reader in her story to such an extent that she lifts her memoir into the wider realm of implicit questioning of how societies operate and how humans relationships develop.

Clare Best will be reading from The Missing List at an event at the University of Sussex of 17^th October, followed by a triple book launch with Jeremy Page and Kay Syrad in Lewes on 24^th October. I only wish I could make it along!

Literary and literal imprisonment, Clare Best's Cell

Clare Best is on one of the most interesting personal journeys in U.K. poetry. She’s constantly evolving, playing with different approaches to verse and blending it with other genres, all without losing her identifying touch.

Her latest production, Cell (Frogmore Press, 2015), is further evidence of her drive. I term it “production” because it’s not quite a pamphlet, rather a poetic artefact. It’s not concrete poetry as such, but it melds the written word to other forms: art and design, as the pages combine pictures by Michaela Ridgway, ingenious origami and Best's verse to create a cell in both literary and literal terms.

The afore-mentioned cell is explained by the poet in her introduction:

“In 1329, Christine Carpenter – a girl of fourteen – took a vow of solitary devotion and agreed to be enclosed in a cell built on to the wall of the chancel of St James’ Church, Shere, Surrey. She spent more than one thousand days in the cell before asking to be freed. When the Bishop learned of her release, he ordered her to be forcibly re-enclosed.”

So the story is full of narrative and emotional impact. That attracts the reader in itself. However, the main critical interest lies in Best’s linguistic approach to her material: the poems tend to speak in the first person singular from Christine’s perspective. Language is drawn from the 21^st Century in every way. In other words, Best has consciously decided to offer us a highly contemporary take on a 14^th Century tale. Here’s a short quote to give a flavour of what I mean:

“…Knees lock on the ice-flagged floor.

The priest’s voice distant, thick as fog.

Stones climb all around me –

only a slip of daylight now…”

What is Clare Best’s intention? It’s to suggest imaginative points of departure for her reader to draw comparisons between the two periods in time, to wonder how much or little has changed, to focus on inherent, eternal human issues: the nature of suffering, injustice, tyranny, sin and religion. She succeeds.

Moreover, there’s a pivotal reflection of female identity throughout Cell. Mother-daughter relationships (as Christine’s mother indirectly, implicitly suffers too), the subjugation to male authority and even the wielding of sexual power are all vital to any understanding of this poetic artefact. Here’s one such instance:

“Lucifer again…

He spins me off my feet,

       scatters fennel seeds

                     and clover for a bed –

       he spreads me,

enters like a fist.”

The portrayal of a traditional figure (Lucifer)  in contemporary sexualised terms is a clear example of Clare Best’s method. It shocks the reader into making fresh leaps and connections. This is why Cell represents such an achievement. 

OPOI

I was delighted to read the other day that Sphinx poetry pamphlet reviews are open for business again (see here). What's more, they're explicitly seeking "OPOI" pieces: i.e. "One Point Of Interest".

This format is especially interesting in the context of short, blog-length reviews. Instead of a whistle-stop, sometimes superficial tour round a collection, the reader finds an in-depth focus on a specific point. Furthermore, true to the Sphinx tradition of juxtaposing different reviews of one pamphlet, the hope is that some chapbooks will attract multiple viewpoints, each picking up on a single aspect, as if engaging in an implicit conversation.

I'll be following developments with interest. For the moment, I'd recommend reading the review by Helena Nelson of Clare Best's remarkable new pamphlet, Cell.

Poems from the Road podcast

Back in the summer I received an e-mail from Robin Vaughan-Williams, a fellow HappenStance poet, asking me to record a reading of my poem "Dad on the M25 After Midnight" (from Inventing Truth).

I'm delighted to report that my recording is now to form part of Robin's Poems from the Road podcast. Poems from the Road is a poetic journey down Britain's A-roads and motorways, exploring the abstraction, violence, landscapes, and migrations that characterise our experience of the road.

Robin's podcast also features verse from many other poets such as Helena Nelson and Clare Best. It will be broadcast on Hive Radio every Thursday in December, 5-6 p.m., as part of the Apples and Snakes Home Cooking series. I'm very much looking forward to hearing it myself!

Spreading the word

Last night's HappenStance reading at the Torriano was a lovely event: the chance to read and listen to terrific poetry in a supportive atmosphere, surrounded by other poets who were on a similar wavelength.

However, the last few weeks, involving trade fairs and tastings, have also been at least as rewarding in poetic terms. Every time a customer, a wine merchant or a sommelier carried off a copy of Tasting Notes to read at home, there was the feeling that my pamphlet was succeeding in one of its key aims: to get non-poetry readers to enjoy contemporary verse.

Just as Clare Best managed with her 2009 HappenStance pamphlet, Treasure Ground, which made its way round farmers' markets, we must find ways to attract new readers to poetry. And that doesn't entail dumbing anything down!