{"id":2674,"date":"2023-05-16T09:50:02","date_gmt":"2023-05-16T09:50:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2674"},"modified":"2023-05-16T09:50:02","modified_gmt":"2023-05-16T09:50:02","slug":"harry-clifton-gone-self-storm-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2674","title":{"rendered":"Harry Clifton, Gone Self Storm – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The cover image of Harry Clifton\u2019s Gone Self Storm<\/em> is Mark Tracey\u2019s beautiful black and white photograph of Howe Strand, which shows a ruined building silhouetted between the running sea and the sky. The poems themselves are haunted by death. Parts One and Three are dedicated to the memory of dead women, the first being the speaker\u2019s mother or stepmother. Part Two begins with a short sequence set in the Glasnevin cemetery, and most of its poems are elegies or addresses to the dead. What\u2019s really distinctive, though, is not this elegiac subject matter but the way ideas of change and disintegration have been absorbed into its style and expressive procedures.\u00a0 Many of the poems slide like dreams between poles of fragmentary but extremely sharply focused distinctness on the one hand and uncertainty on the other. This is clearly deliberate, suggesting how ungraspable things become as they slip into the past. Moreover, the speaker\u2019s uncertainty about things surrounding him extends to uncertainty about himself. The section dedicated to his mother begins \u2018I was conceived, the story goes, \/ On a Dutch tramp steamer \/ Ploughing the Magellan Straits \/ Halfway to Buenos Aires.\u2019 Later in the section, \u2018Stepmother\u2019 begins:<\/p>\n

You were drafted in
\nAt the moment of conception,
\nFilling an empty space \u2013
\nAnd I learned to call you Mother.<\/p>\n

Looking back to discover where he comes from, the poet finds:<\/p>\n

A language all conditionals, subjunctives
\nIn a land of might-have-been, where the cloudscapes thicken<\/p>\n

Though the whole section is about this Mother, it isn\u2019t always clear whether a given poem is about<\/em>\u00a0 her or spoken by<\/em> her about someone else. There are vivid glimpses of her story, but continuous uncertainty about how to thread them together. Throughout the book, poems are full of narrative details but their power isn\u2019t in narrative development, it\u2019s in the lyrical presentation of emotions arising from the poet\u2019s never-quite-successful attempts to pin down elusive aspects of his and other people\u2019s stories and in the probing sharpness of his intelligence as it flickers over and through them. Ultimately, I think, what the poems most continuously express is the sense that reality is fugitive, both because things change and because even in the moment of experience our perceptions are provisional and inadequate. Clifton often surrounds literal description or narrative with mythological associations that extend or dissolve the literal into a kind of penumbral suggestiveness that seems to carry the weight of the poem\u2019s feeling. The sonnet \u2018The Gravediggers\u2019 opens:<\/p>\n

Three of them slaking thirst, this Saturday
\nIn the back-bar of the gravediggers\u2019 pub \u2013
\nA black and lightless realm, where to drink is to pray
\nNot to a soul in a mirror, a cigarette stub,<\/p>\n

But to the millions gone before,
\nThe city of the dead, on this side of town<\/p>\n

The concrete detail of lines 1, 2 and 4 gives the poem a solid core. The poet\u2019s lyrical reflections are expressed metaphorically in lines 3, 5 and 6. The life of the poem lies in the tension between the scene itself and the poet\u2019s response.\u00a0 An extremely successful example of the technique is the short sequence \u2018The Felling\u2019. This involves several overlapping circles of reference \u2013 what a certain pine wood meant in the poet\u2019s youth, and how he feels returning after long absence to find it cut down; memories of the life of the area long ago; old and now dead women, apparently the poet\u2019s aunts; the flowers that they planted now growing wild. The beauty of the poem is in the way it develops by a series of dreamlike transitions in which one idea blurs into or becomes another, often by means of a mythological parallel. The pine wood becomes a metaphor for the aunts themselves and a focus for meditation on death. Near the start Clifton writes:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I came back, like rain on the wind,<\/p>\n

From a great elsewhere, to the ruined Parthenon
\nOf trunks, the raped Arcadian grove
\nOnce picnicked in by sisters, maiden aunts<\/p>\n

Now shades of themselves, the lake shining through
\nIn the distance, spread like a water table
\nWith its own best silver.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a magical shimmering between these images of bare pine trunks, ruined stone pillars, the raped Arcadian grove, and the picnicking ladies, now ghosts of themselves in age or death. Not only does each image reflect on<\/em> the others, they shine through<\/em> each other, as human social pretensions shine through the image of the lake spread with its best silver. There\u2019s humour here, but the tone can darken dramatically, even nightmarishly, as when the thought of the old trees before their cutting down makes Clifton imagine:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A sisterhood
\nOf old trees, leaning into each other,<\/p>\n

Conspiratorial, whispering on every wind
\nThe inside story… I have strayed
\nInto their circle. Dead, they stare at me,<\/p>\n

Offer me cakes, cold tea, a place at a distance
\nFrom the human family.<\/p>\n

But life is change, apparent loss may be transformation and renewal. The series ends,<\/p>\n

Goodbye dears, and thank you. Everything<\/p>\n

Has run wild again, but nothing is lost.
\nI stand in the long grass. Arcadia, Parthenon \u2013
\nEverything that shadowed us has gone.<\/p>\n

The way this poetry proceeds by metaphorical suggestions and lyrical declaration means that it\u2019s equally able to suggest the sorrows and fears of what feels like loss and aspirations to a more buoyant embracing of changing life.<\/p>\n

I hope my quotations have suggested how skilfully Clifton deploys rhythm and metaphor in a lyrical mode. It\u2019s not his only approach, though. Urbane and erudite, even in the plainest language he\u2019s a master of the arresting phrase whose ironies set the mind going in multiple directions. \u2018The Has-beens\u2019 begins:<\/p>\n

You who managed your decline
\nSo beautifully, who withdrew
\nAt just the right time \u2013<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u2018After the Barbarians\u2019 starts:<\/p>\n

Back then, I wanted to be
\nA heterosexual Cavafy \u2013<\/p>\n

Here, language and cadence are those of ordinary speech, heightened by their compact pointedness, the precision with which punctuation and line ending control emphasis, and the surefooted speed of their movement through ideas.<\/p>\n

Gone Self Storm<\/em> by Harry Clifton. \u00a310.99. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 978-1-78037-453-6<\/p>\n

I would like to thank David Cooke for permission to repost this review, which appears in Summer 2023 edition of The High Window<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The cover image of Harry Clifton\u2019s Gone Self Storm is Mark Tracey\u2019s beautiful black and white photograph of Howe Strand, which shows a ruined building silhouetted between the running sea and the sky. The poems themselves are haunted by death. Parts One and Three are dedicated to the memory of dead women, the first being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harry-clifton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2674"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2674"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2676,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2674\/revisions\/2676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}