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it was as easy to make them laugh
as to find a vein. (Mine, Then)
If I were looking for a single word to describe Claire Crowther’s work, “edgy” might do. There is a pervasive sense of unease, and nothing that could be called a comfort zone. It is the kind of poetry that keeps you on the alert, reading with your mind fully focused, because at any moment an unexpected line break or double meaning can jolt you out of what you thought was the path you were following:
If two atoms
share an electron and bond in one body
in one compass-
ion of matter swaying with so much co-
incidence direct-
ionless as the atoms (The Physics of Coincidence)
Even a poem that ends upbeat, like “Snow at Christmas”, creates along the way this frisson of danger:
I’ve thought of snow as a raptor that seizes
holly,
ivy, all the evergreens, a dog that bites
a child
near the eye.
The other characteristic, for me, that stands out in her poems is their verbal inventiveness. Sometimes this is (almost) purely playful, like the ship’s foghorn that goes “ohhhm, ohhhm” (from Solar Cruise), but most of the time her wordplay is as deadly serious as that of George Herbert, pointing to relationships between not just words but the things they stand for. This verbal dexterity was perhaps never more evident than in the collection A Pair of Three, which chronicled the experience of being married to a person previously widowed and whose former partner is still felt as s presence in the marriage:
It’s late. No, partner, not too late. Still
one of us is late:
Her verbal coinages in that collection, like “werhusband”, and her figuring of the relationship in games with the lexis of grammar, were often technically dazzling, but never devoid of feeling. The same technical ability shows in the sureness of her line. “Dive, I did, I dived and did I land”, from “The Needles, Isle of Wight” may look convoluted on the page, but read it aloud and its rhythms are instinctive. The sound-patterns in
Scrape the ditch that fits Hob’s Moat
to Hatchford Brook. Look through oak roots (Lost Child)
are so ingrained and unobtrusive, they could be missed on a sight-reading; this is a poet who really repays being read aloud.
Crowther is sometimes seen as a “difficult” poet. Mostly this means no more than that reading her work requires concentration and intelligence. But now and then, it’s a question of trying to read her imagery as she does, and I must confess that I have not yet got my head around the “Lady Lear” poems in the final section, because I’m not sure what the figure of “Lady Lear” is doing or representing, though I am fairly sure she isn’t just a female version of King Lear. Several of the non-Lear poems in this section, like “Is Stepping Out Dying or Being Born?”. “Last Supper” and “A Covert Bird”, seem to revolve around the word “shy”, and I think that might end up being an easier way into them.
The other word that often occurs to me when reading this poet is “ambitious”. The sheer daring, as well as inventiveness, in the central image of Solar Cruise: a cruise on which poet and physicist are partners and passengers and where the physicist seems to be trying to convert his fellow passengers on the SS Eschatology (a ship of fools? An ark?) to the concept of solar energy. Her willingness to use quite specialised, sometimes arcane, vocabularies: that of physics in Solar Cruise; that of grammar in A Pair of Three. Her way of constantly pushing words, images, meanings beyond where you thought they were going: to the edge, in fact. Often exhilarating, occasionally baffling, never predictable, never dull.
