London Grip Poetry Review – Clare Best
Poetry Review â Each Other: Mat Riches thinks Clare Bestâs poems have some very convincing things to say about relationships
Each Other Clare Best Waterloo Press ISBN: 9781906742843 ÂŁ12
While this is ostensibly a collection about love and relationships, it feels to me that it is more about communication between pairs of people â the each to the other of mother or father to child, child to mother or father, husband and wife.
And yet for me there is a sense that this is a collection that highlights â or possibly even revels in â the everyday, the mundanity of daily routines. A quick flick through the pages of finds us observing scenes set on beaches, in cafĂ©s, bathrooms, bedrooms or gardens, or watching situations involving dogs, hugs, quiet pints in country pubs. To continue the random flicking through we can see this in titles like âMy mother with rosesâ, âIn Februaryâ, âPostcards, Cuckmere Havenâ, âEn suiteâ, âTheir night and dayâ or âTheir dogâ. Even the use of lowercase in the titles adds to this sense of the everyday.
However, itâs very much worth noting that this everydayness is not a bad thing or that these are everyday poems. The settings may be, but the contents are not; they are filled with action and movement. Things either get moving from the very get-go or there is action at the start almost every poem. Again, adopting the randomised sampling approach to prove my pointâŠin âMy mother with Seville orangesâ (and itâs worth quoting this in full) weâre told
She visits me in the night with string bags of bitter oranges, and sugarâshe canât find the pan or the jam thermometer, where is the rind shredder? We descend to a dark kitchen to gut and slice the fruit by hand then simmer it for hours. I sink into orange-scented sleep while she seals twelve lit jars.
There is literally so much happening in this poem, the visits, the gutting of oranges, the simmering and sinking and sealing; but then there are the questions it raises: is this a dream? Is this something brought about by Alzheimerâs disease on the motherâs part?
Either way (and my money is on the latter) thereâs a care and consideration about this poem that I love, and those last two lines are as rich and evocative as any jar of marmalade. They sound as though they have the rind left in, with plenty get your teeth into and the âlit jarsâ are a lovely image â it reminds me of the Jacob Polley poem, âA Jar of Honeyâ and its line âYou hold it like a lit bulb, / a pound of lightâŠâ. However, what I like most about that image is the mother left to finish a job, and to be able to find peace in closure after the urgency of the first stanza.
While the first section of the book does involve relationships with others, a son in âKintsugiâ or a father-in-law and her son in âMy father-in-law embraces my sonâ, at least eight, possibly more ,of the poems feature the poetâs mother, either with the aforementioned oranges or with roses, chestnuts or sweet peas.
âMy mother with sweet peasâ manages to pull of the impressive feat of being doubly elegiac by talking about her mother in the past tense, âShe couldnât bear formalityâ and then shifting to talking about her motherâs recollections of the loss of a child (a brother Best didnât know perhaps) â âItâs her memory, not mineâ suggests this. Earlier in the poem weâre told
She heaped loose sweet peas on his small white box And when the men in slate suits carried him into the chapelâŠ
The use of so many stressed syllables in a row in those first two lines reinforces the messages early, ramming home the lack of formality with âheaped looseâ flowers, and âsmall white boxâ really hitting hard â a childâs coffin is a terrible thing to have to see.
The second section of the book is actually the longer of the two. However, itâs the one I initially struggled to connect with as much as the first section. Best is very clear in the acknowledgements at the start of the book that these are fictional characters, that they âbear no intentional relation to any real persons, living or dead, though it is hoped they may bring some to mind.â
The struggle came, for me, in warming to the characters that this section revolves around, particularly the male character. However, by the end of the section it becomes possible to have sympathies with both of them.
For a nascent couple they spend a lot of time apart at the beginning. In a pair of poems about favourite places we see them separate from each other, for example in âHis favourite places: 1â, âhe runs to summer woodsâ or âhe walks in autumn woodsâ or âWhen skies are colourless / he sits alone indoorsâ â that final iamb / trochee / iamb reinforcing the separation. For her in âHer favourite places: 1â we see
This placeâ she loves this hollow, vacant place.
This remoteness from each other continues throughout this section, even in supposedly intimate poems like âRules for pleasureâ with its âMonthly trial positions / from the Kama Sutraâ and the male protagonist âRevisiting the fantasies when sheâs away one weekend staying / with her motherâ. This is followed by âPost-coitalâ which ends with the female protagonist thinking not of âher hungry spaces filledâ or that she âcould plant and fell / a stand of giant oaksâ but of âreturning to humid kitchen / after bakingâ and sliding â..a blunt knife around / inside the tin, to free the cake, / and finds the edge of bliss.â
I was initially sceptical about this couple, I couldnât buy into them as a pairing that needed, or even particularly wanted each other; but by the end of the section there was a love and respect there between them that is confirmed by the final lines of the final poem, âThereâs hardly anythingâ
⊠and something in them knows all they know of each other is this love
The spacing and lack of punctuation at the end speak volumes about a) the distances between this couple and b) a sense that there is still somewhere for them to go. It hasnât finished.
Despite the lack or absence of conversations between the couple, whatâs interesting to me is the way in which the two sections also speak to other. For example, both sections open with a focus on things that exert a gravitational pull on us, firstly the moon and then the sun in âMoon Houseâ and âDedicationâ, respectively. In Moon House (the section) thereâs the night meeting of âMy mother with Seville orangesâ, in Each Other (the section), we see our couple in âNight Meetingsâ, âThe first time he found her / downstairs in the middle of the nightâ.
There are further examples of this to be had, but they deserve to be sought out by the reader. This is a book that is brimming with ideas, thinking, experiments with form and intrigue and, while I donât want to do it a disservice by handing the final lines to the very opposite of these things, I think the Gallagher brothers had it right when, in their song âAcquiesceâ, they sang âAnd we need each otherâ. They did. You do too.
A Coincidence of Oranges â Wear The Fox Hat
January 10, 2021 @ 9:11 pm
[…] said plenty about this poem and the rest of Clare’s book here, so if you get rind* to it you can read it 4. I’d sort of forgotten about points one to three […]