Poetry review – REAL LEAR: Jennifer Johnson admires the wit and originality on display in this New & Selected from Claire Crowther
Real Lear – New & Selected Poems
Claire Crowther
Shearsman Books
ISBN 9781848619388
140pp £12.95
This 140-page book is made up of a selection of poems from six collections. Crowther is a poet whose work was previously unknown to me though I recognised her name as the deputy editor of the Long Poem Magazine. I was delighted to find after reading this collection a body of work that was genuinely thought-provoking and wittily original. The poems lie in the traditions of modernism and surrealism but are written from a contemporary feminist viewpoint. Language is made visible particularly in relationship to gender. Any reader familiar with poetry should find these poems accessible and be able to appreciate their wit and technical skill. Space will allow me only to draw attention to 6 poems, one from each collection represented in this book, to illustrate these points.
The first poem I want to consider is “The Sentence Mender” in Stretch of Closures. The poem feels surrealistic as it uses language as a metaphor. It begins ‘I carry my voice out at night away from our house to West Hill/station.’ The poet imagines the voice as a physical object she can carry. This first sentence is deliberately laboured as if the persona is weighed down by heaviness. Later as she sits by the bus stop there’s an energetic list of ‘heels, brakes, horns, cut-off exhausts, the blue hat man, phones’ that she has to wait for until they ‘have quietened’. Then she can ‘storm this firmament,/blare from scaffolding, against murders of windows,’. This shows her, after a period of silence, being able to use her voice in angry fragmented outbursts. Towards the end of the poem you find out why the persona’s language is awry when she says ‘At home, my husband hates the sound of me.’ She says that ‘I will work on it in the garage,/a sentence-mender.’ Using a male garage for a female ‘sentence-maker’ is highly original and, of course, ‘sentence’ has more than one meaning.
The next poem I want to look at is “The Thike” from The Clockwork Gift. The ‘small-lifed thike’ is a creature ‘Ranked first of unknown fauna,’ a formal phrase to describe a possibly imagined animal. For most of the poem great fun is had imagining the interest created by this unusual, localised beast. To take one example
Celebrities on Channel Five News
have endorsed the policing of thike-baiters.
The tone, however, changes at the end of the poem
Remember,
when you hear a Fastruk lorry
reverse, screeching, thikes lack ears.
We elect the animals we harbour.
The poem ridicules invented traditions and unhearing ‘thike’ or ‘thick’ politicians.
I want to next look at “The Alices” from On Narrowness. This poem has fun making use of the language used in the Jabberwocky poem from Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. In this poem you don’t have to remember the meanings Humpty Dumpty ascribed to the nonsense words used but guess the meanings from their sounds, for e.g., brilliant for ‘brillig’. Humpty Dumpty, of course, said a word ‘means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ This poem is also a political one, this one concerning male politicians being ‘slithy’ when talking to the media and having affairs with ‘The Alices’ who ‘support them’.
“Genia in Memoriam: Irene Joliot-Curie, Ida Noddack, Lisa Meitner” from Solar Cruise is the next poem I want to consider. This poem centres on nuclear fission from a feminist viewpoint, imagining what three famous female physicists have said about splitting the atom. The Irony Titles are particularly fun. The first is ‘Irony 1: Gender Fission’ using the idea that the men could have done with some womensplaining and ‘Irony 2: The History of the Waist by Lisa Meitner/Who Famously Described the Splitting Atom as Waisted’. The poem explains ‘A man does not have a waist’ but ‘A woman has a waist.’ A witty pun is used in the lines ‘a woman becomes/explosive when a waist of/energy is imposed upon her.’ The men seem to be restricted by scientific language whereas the women use language which is more straightforward.
The poem “The Us” from A Pair of Three also makes use of a limited male viewpoint circumscribed by the scientific language. The concepts of randomness and order are used to illustrate the dynamics of a relationship. The poem begins
I ran downstairs
and said 'I've just thought:
We are random.
The you and I.
The she and you.
The she and I.
The us.'
'Here ' Keith said -
he pushed aside his coffee,
picked up the stapler
Keith is evidently obsessed with the importance of staples to keep his papers in order. The female ‘I’ persona does not enjoy the role she is expected to play
I felt I was the wall
the molecules of his ordering thought
bounced against.
and a few lines later she shows her wider language perspective with
Too many meanings!
Food is staples.
Afterwards Keith talks about the increasing complexity of molecules while standing by the door.
Order in the universe increased tremendously
and love became an evolutionary principle.
The poem ends with ‘I ran upstairs’ showing that Keith has failed to understand his partner.
The final part Real Lear contains the the most recent poetry, beginning with the quote from Act 4, Sc. 6 of the Shakespeare play
You must bear with me. Pray you now,
forget and forgive. I am old and foolish.
In this section we find the brilliant surrealistic “Lear’s Inwit”. In it we learn that ‘The Report said nothing’ because it is suffering from confusion and feeling ‘bereft’. It depends for its function on its writer but ‘its writer had gone’. The Report initially concludes ‘that it could only say what had been said. It could only repeat.’ Then the Report realises that ‘It could imagine’ and with that it had breath and was ‘drunk with the sensation’ and could move away from the desk.
It is, to my mind, the wit of such original conceits and phrases that make this book a most unusual one which many readers should find genuinely stimulating. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in reading poetry that is intelligent and sharply observant about gender differences in language use.
May 7 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Claire Crowther
Poetry review – REAL LEAR: Jennifer Johnson admires the wit and originality on display in this New & Selected from Claire Crowther
This 140-page book is made up of a selection of poems from six collections. Crowther is a poet whose work was previously unknown to me though I recognised her name as the deputy editor of the Long Poem Magazine. I was delighted to find after reading this collection a body of work that was genuinely thought-provoking and wittily original. The poems lie in the traditions of modernism and surrealism but are written from a contemporary feminist viewpoint. Language is made visible particularly in relationship to gender. Any reader familiar with poetry should find these poems accessible and be able to appreciate their wit and technical skill. Space will allow me only to draw attention to 6 poems, one from each collection represented in this book, to illustrate these points.
The first poem I want to consider is “The Sentence Mender” in Stretch of Closures. The poem feels surrealistic as it uses language as a metaphor. It begins ‘I carry my voice out at night away from our house to West Hill/station.’ The poet imagines the voice as a physical object she can carry. This first sentence is deliberately laboured as if the persona is weighed down by heaviness. Later as she sits by the bus stop there’s an energetic list of ‘heels, brakes, horns, cut-off exhausts, the blue hat man, phones’ that she has to wait for until they ‘have quietened’. Then she can ‘storm this firmament,/blare from scaffolding, against murders of windows,’. This shows her, after a period of silence, being able to use her voice in angry fragmented outbursts. Towards the end of the poem you find out why the persona’s language is awry when she says ‘At home, my husband hates the sound of me.’ She says that ‘I will work on it in the garage,/a sentence-mender.’ Using a male garage for a female ‘sentence-maker’ is highly original and, of course, ‘sentence’ has more than one meaning.
The next poem I want to look at is “The Thike” from The Clockwork Gift. The ‘small-lifed thike’ is a creature ‘Ranked first of unknown fauna,’ a formal phrase to describe a possibly imagined animal. For most of the poem great fun is had imagining the interest created by this unusual, localised beast. To take one example
The tone, however, changes at the end of the poem
The poem ridicules invented traditions and unhearing ‘thike’ or ‘thick’ politicians.
I want to next look at “The Alices” from On Narrowness. This poem has fun making use of the language used in the Jabberwocky poem from Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. In this poem you don’t have to remember the meanings Humpty Dumpty ascribed to the nonsense words used but guess the meanings from their sounds, for e.g., brilliant for ‘brillig’. Humpty Dumpty, of course, said a word ‘means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ This poem is also a political one, this one concerning male politicians being ‘slithy’ when talking to the media and having affairs with ‘The Alices’ who ‘support them’.
“Genia in Memoriam: Irene Joliot-Curie, Ida Noddack, Lisa Meitner” from Solar Cruise is the next poem I want to consider. This poem centres on nuclear fission from a feminist viewpoint, imagining what three famous female physicists have said about splitting the atom. The Irony Titles are particularly fun. The first is ‘Irony 1: Gender Fission’ using the idea that the men could have done with some womensplaining and ‘Irony 2: The History of the Waist by Lisa Meitner/Who Famously Described the Splitting Atom as Waisted’. The poem explains ‘A man does not have a waist’ but ‘A woman has a waist.’ A witty pun is used in the lines ‘a woman becomes/explosive when a waist of/energy is imposed upon her.’ The men seem to be restricted by scientific language whereas the women use language which is more straightforward.
The poem “The Us” from A Pair of Three also makes use of a limited male viewpoint circumscribed by the scientific language. The concepts of randomness and order are used to illustrate the dynamics of a relationship. The poem begins
I ran downstairs and said 'I've just thought: We are random. The you and I. The she and you. The she and I. The us.' 'Here ' Keith said - he pushed aside his coffee, picked up the staplerKeith is evidently obsessed with the importance of staples to keep his papers in order. The female ‘I’ persona does not enjoy the role she is expected to play
and a few lines later she shows her wider language perspective with
Afterwards Keith talks about the increasing complexity of molecules while standing by the door.
The poem ends with ‘I ran upstairs’ showing that Keith has failed to understand his partner.
The final part Real Lear contains the the most recent poetry, beginning with the quote from Act 4, Sc. 6 of the Shakespeare play
In this section we find the brilliant surrealistic “Lear’s Inwit”. In it we learn that ‘The Report said nothing’ because it is suffering from confusion and feeling ‘bereft’. It depends for its function on its writer but ‘its writer had gone’. The Report initially concludes ‘that it could only say what had been said. It could only repeat.’ Then the Report realises that ‘It could imagine’ and with that it had breath and was ‘drunk with the sensation’ and could move away from the desk.
It is, to my mind, the wit of such original conceits and phrases that make this book a most unusual one which many readers should find genuinely stimulating. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in reading poetry that is intelligent and sharply observant about gender differences in language use.