Poetry review – HEALING THE PACK: Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch admires clare e. potter’s intricate blending of the animate and inanimate
Healing The Pack
clare e. potter
Verve Press
ISBN: 978 1 913917 52 4
£11.99
How can a collection be at once so grounded yet swirl in the air like one of the many birds that swoop and dive across its pages (doves, red-tailed hawks, buzzards, humming birds, crows, eagles)? Part of the answer is in clay. We are in the hands of a master craftsperson, a poet who is truly a maker (‘poien’ is the Greek verb meaning ‘to make’) who traces the beginning of her creative apprenticeship back to turning a ceramic pot as a teenager. The speaker describes the making of the pot as if it is a woman coming to life: body parts emerge from clay (‘womb neck, cervix, mouth, intestines’) back into a pot in such a way that the writer enables us to see both woman and ceramic in the same glance. Once the pot is fired and the speaker puts the pot to her ear she hears the pot speaking ‘all the secrets I could not’ which subtly makes it seem that even after being fired the pot has retained human attributes.
The ceramic in the poem “Organic Matter” made by a human, and appearing to look human during the process of its creation, becomes an emblem for the entire book which moves effortlessly between people, objects and birds, as if they are all members of the same pack referred to in the title. Indeed the speakers in this collection are accompanied by – or observed by – birds in locations as far apart as the Mexico and South Wales. This deft free-flow from ceramic to human yet always in the company of birds, is what enables the reader to believe the ending: in the penultimate poem the speaker’s younger self is clothed in a wolf pelt. We have a human inside a wolf pelt echoing the way the human had been inside the clay earlier in the collection.
Although this is a collection that has language and family dialect firmly at its core (‘a bubble of mumbles and heartspeak’– how delicious is that?) and is riven through with the influences of the Welsh system of rhyming, cynghanedd (‘we were a tribe, a trio of tongues finding words’ w…r…tr/tr…t…wrd), this book examines through its use of language, the different ways in which a poem can take off from the page.
One of the ways in which a poem can fly off the page is through the use of powerful metaphors and similes. Potter is a writer who can handle these with ease right from the get-go: ‘autumn had dragged summer’s yolk into September’ (p.13), ‘smile frail as moth wings’ (p. 21). Elsewhere Potter compares the creation of a poem to the way her son moves on his scooter; she observes how the scooter is both ‘at one with the ground’s deep pulse’ and yet allows him ‘at speed to leave air’ (p. 44). Looking at her own analogy I would say that clare e. potter’s arresting new collection has succeeded in doing exactly this.
May 27 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – clare e potter
Poetry review – HEALING THE PACK: Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch admires clare e. potter’s intricate blending of the animate and inanimate
How can a collection be at once so grounded yet swirl in the air like one of the many birds that swoop and dive across its pages (doves, red-tailed hawks, buzzards, humming birds, crows, eagles)? Part of the answer is in clay. We are in the hands of a master craftsperson, a poet who is truly a maker (‘poien’ is the Greek verb meaning ‘to make’) who traces the beginning of her creative apprenticeship back to turning a ceramic pot as a teenager. The speaker describes the making of the pot as if it is a woman coming to life: body parts emerge from clay (‘womb neck, cervix, mouth, intestines’) back into a pot in such a way that the writer enables us to see both woman and ceramic in the same glance. Once the pot is fired and the speaker puts the pot to her ear she hears the pot speaking ‘all the secrets I could not’ which subtly makes it seem that even after being fired the pot has retained human attributes.
The ceramic in the poem “Organic Matter” made by a human, and appearing to look human during the process of its creation, becomes an emblem for the entire book which moves effortlessly between people, objects and birds, as if they are all members of the same pack referred to in the title. Indeed the speakers in this collection are accompanied by – or observed by – birds in locations as far apart as the Mexico and South Wales. This deft free-flow from ceramic to human yet always in the company of birds, is what enables the reader to believe the ending: in the penultimate poem the speaker’s younger self is clothed in a wolf pelt. We have a human inside a wolf pelt echoing the way the human had been inside the clay earlier in the collection.
Although this is a collection that has language and family dialect firmly at its core (‘a bubble of mumbles and heartspeak’– how delicious is that?) and is riven through with the influences of the Welsh system of rhyming, cynghanedd (‘we were a tribe, a trio of tongues finding words’ w…r…tr/tr…t…wrd), this book examines through its use of language, the different ways in which a poem can take off from the page.
One of the ways in which a poem can fly off the page is through the use of powerful metaphors and similes. Potter is a writer who can handle these with ease right from the get-go: ‘autumn had dragged summer’s yolk into September’ (p.13), ‘smile frail as moth wings’ (p. 21). Elsewhere Potter compares the creation of a poem to the way her son moves on his scooter; she observes how the scooter is both ‘at one with the ground’s deep pulse’ and yet allows him ‘at speed to leave air’ (p. 44). Looking at her own analogy I would say that clare e. potter’s arresting new collection has succeeded in doing exactly this.