Clanchy, Kate
CLANCHY, Kate
Nationality: British. Born: Katharine Sarah Clancy, Glasgow, 6 November 1965. Family: Married Matthew Reynolds in 1999. Career: Teacher of English and drama, Copthall Comprehensive School, Barnet, 1988–90; teacher at various schools in the Lothian region, 1990–91; teacher of English, 1992–94, teacher of English and writerin-residence, 1994–98, Havering Sixth Form College, Essex; teachertrainer for network training, the Poetry Library, Oxford University Department of Education, 1998–99. Since 1999 lecturer, Keble College, Oxford. Awards: Eric Gregory award, Society of Authors, 1994; New London Writers award, 1996; Scottish Autumn Book award, London Arts Board, 1996; Forward prize, Scottish Arts Council, 1996; Scottish First Book of the Year award, Saltire Society, 1996; Somerset Maugham award, Society of Authors, 1997; Scottish Spring Book award, Scottish Arts Council, 2000.
Publications
Poetry
Slattern. London, Chatto and Windus, 1996.
Samarkand. London, Picador, 1999.
* * *Either in life or in letters, the usual methods of definition do not apply to Kate Clanchy. Her first book, Slattern, joined a metaphysical sense of language to a quite startling apprehension of matters either passed over or not hitherto thought worth writing about. Hers is an exquisitely feminine consciousness, and it reminds us that whole areas of experience have been brought to awareness by poets arriving in the wake of Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath, bold enough to write about that which needs to be written about, no matter how slight, no matter how wounding.
"Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell" definitely breaks new ground, smell not being a prime constituent of poetry. The speaker defines each area of her body much as Marvell grazed the face and bosom of his coy mistress, but she does so in terms of olfactory sensations: the "bass note" of the armpits, the "wet flush" of her fear, the delicate hairs on the nape of her neck that "hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet/of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea."
This image is a kind of norm that emerges at intervals through an output notable for its variegation. With elegant poise "For a Wedding" runs through the difficulties and pleasures that may be conjectured of the married state and ends with a vision at once of relaxation and of precariousness:
I wish you years that shape, that form,
and a pond in a Sunday, urban garden;
where you'll see your joined reflection tremble,
stand and watch the waterboatmen
skate with ease across the surface tension.
A similar image, of tiny waterborne creatures, sounds a note of warning in "Patagonia": "the last clinging barnacles,/growing worried in the hush, had/paddled off in tiny coracles &" The breakup of a love affair affords a theme available to both sexes, but in the poetry of a writer such as Clanchy the situation is approached sideways. The poem is definite in feeling but, on first reading, elusive in narrative structure.
Here Patagonia is a name, not a land. It stands for a belief that two people can be idyllically happy in their own world. But what is this world? It is full of contradictions, a peninsula wide enough for a couple of "ladderback chairs," presumably the furniture, such as it is, that the couple have in their room. The poem, couched in a masterly free verse, is not speech in the usual sense but rather a meditation in the mind of the protagonist, and it seems that her partner is paying her little attention. There is a remarkable transition from the fauna—"restless birds"—to the lover's hands. One implication may be that he is about to administer the coup de grâce. The woman anticipates this, crying,
When I spoke of Patagonia, I meant
skies all empty aching blue. I meant
years, I meant all of them with you.
The effect is to intensify the troubled hope of the earlier lines into something very like despair. There is a triple "I meant": "I meant skies"; "I meant years"; "I meant all of them." It is too late, however, for her to say what she meant. Whatever she meant, none of it is going to happen now. It is the intensification of hopelessness achieved by these doubts and these repetitions that renders the lines a key to the whole, highly original poem.
The critic Gerald Woodward has written, "Clanchy's real gifts& are an ear perfectly tuned to the rhythms and sonorities of the poetic line, an eye that is able to catch fresh glimpses of the world, and a facility with metaphor that casts up delightful conceits." Perhaps her second book, Samarkand, which Woodward was reviewing, does not quite live up to the promise of the first. The amount of whimsy in relation to thought has increased. In "The Acolyte," for example, Clanchy pictures herself humorously as a humble woman at the foot of a phallic pillar, on top of which is her lover "surveying a perfect circumference of sunset." In the promisingly named "War Poetry" a class of boys, who under other circumstances would enlist to fight for their country, sit abashed as they watch through the safety of glass a menacing swarm of wasps that have been disturbed. Somehow the later poems live a little too comfortably within the protection of their author's irreproachable style and flawless technique. It seems that the questioning and disturbance that gives such power to the first book has somewhat abated.
Nonetheless, Clanchy has shown extraordinary talent. Based on what she has achieved, she stands out among the significant poets of the past thirty years or so.
—Philip Hobsbaum