Boldness

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Monica’s Overcoat of Flesh (Nine Arches, 2020) 

Medlars (Shearsman, 2023)

Dream Island Home for Isabelle Huppert (Verve, forthcoming)

Two of the boldest British poets of the last fifty years shared a life but never met. Both chose to change their given names. Both emerged from Celtic margins where traditional community languages had been largely occluded by English. They are Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924-1992), baptised Pierre, whose Breton grandfather had emigrated to Guernsey; and Geraldine Clarkson, who grew up in a large working-class Irish family in the 1980s, living near Birmingham but maintaining close links with ancestral communities near the western Gaeltacht.
   The life which these two poets chose to share was the ancient Benedictine rule, a celibate formation in meditation, work and prayer. So their time on this earth overlapped, even if (I’m guessing) Clarkson was entering the Order as a novice even as Dom Sylvester was finally departing. And to any nitpicky comments that she spent ‘only’ ten years as a Benedictine nun and is one no longer, my response would be that for both poets the monastic rule of silence, as a devotional and meditational practice, had a profound effect on their poetics in visual, imagistic and sonic terms.
   I start from the immediate impact of the poet’s first full collection, Monica’s Overcoat of Flesh (2020). Clarkson might have thought that pandemic lockdowns would hinder its chances, but came to see that the constraints of convent life, which are one of its themes, were somehow intensified for readers by the social restraints they now found themselves struggling with. Her boldness of voice seems to have emerged fully formed: resonant, impertinent, unpredictable. Other poets clearly recognised this: Steve Ely deftly encapsulates her writing as ‘Ferociously alert and intelligent, playful, witty, profound and funny.’ There had been earlier chapbooks from 2016 onwards, of course, from Smith|Doorstop (2016), Shearsman (2016, 2018) and Verve (2021), but the array of national and international journals, anthologies, prizewinning poems and bursary awards now dutifully recorded in this first collection’s Acknowledgements suggests speed of recognition arising from energetic commitment to the talents gifted to her.
   The sheer drive of publication continuing into Medlars (2023) creates a trajectory that I find myself wanting to call transcendent. That is not necessarily a religious term. Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ comes to mind. Developed in the post-war United States, it proposed a five-stage ascending psychological scale from basic physiological needs for food and safety up to self-actualization in morality, creativity and sense of purpose. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Maslow expanded this into a subtler eight-stage model culminating in the need for transcendence. Here some individuals may move beyond self-actualization into a deeper sense of unity and belonging within the vastness of the universe, towards mystical experience, possibly, or into deeper aesthetic, religious or scientific exploration, or service to others. This is not simply a linear progression, any more than eternity is an unending sequence of days. In a timeless world, everything must be equidistant, encountered in a state of all-at-onceness. My sense of Geraldine Clarkson’s writing is something like that – perplexing in its range initially (high ritual meets higgledy-piggledy meets delicacy or bawdiness across her formally inventive pages) but moving sure-footedly between personal concerns, altruism, wit and connectedness.
   Her fondness for punning may be an aspect of that, as if wordplay acts as an echo of the alternative or shadow meanings of thought. For example, Monica of the book’s title becomes [monikers] in the subtitle of its first section. Monikers here are not merely nicknames or family names, but foreground the issue of postulants in monastic orders taking a new ‘name in religion’ as an outward sign of altered spiritual identity. When the title poem ‘Monica’s Overcoat of Flesh’ appears in the second section [overcoat], a note refers us to different mystical traditions which imagine the body as garment: ‘in Sanskrit the body is “the jacket made of food”’.
    Again I am reminded of Dom Sylvester Houédard, whose letters to his fellow concrete poet Edwin Morgan are full of wordplay and jokiness but at times swing easily into cross-cultural religious imagery, as if viewing his own typographical constructions as icons or mandalas, and concrete poetry itself as a meditative practice. Edwin Morgan tended to tiptoe around that topic, as I recall, while liking and admiring dsh tremendously.
 I’ll quote that titular poem here, partly because it is brief enough at sonnet length, but mainly because its poignant theme of a dead child resonates so deeply of family grief and the attention to the child’s rebelliousness seems, to me, so telling.

Am I still a mother if the girl I reared happened

to sicken and die, fast-tracking there as she did

everything else? There is no word for it,

not widowed nor barren, nor maid, no moniker

to give a warning to would-be interlocutors.

Bond of selkie-silk, little twin with double 

helping of brass. Could she, cushla,

have inveigled the boatman, like she would,

slipped a nod, a wink, a broken-stemmed dandelion;

rusticate, tangle-haired, red-cheeked, tearing

out of childhood, eschewing what wilts.

Shrugging off the fussy overcoat.

Monica. For the last time, will you

come when I call you. Bold child. 

The note informs us that cushla is an anglicised corruption of the Irish A chuisle mo chroi, which means ‘oh pulse of my heart’. There’s an Irish intonation too in the word ‘Bold’, which I sense as Hiberno-English for Ná bí dána, ‘Don’t be bold’, which an exasperated Irish mother would say where an English parent might use ‘naughty’ or ‘disobedient’. The Irish word also carries connotations of daring, forwardness, audacity: a double helping of brass. There’s a wildness in this emboldened child, then, a refusal to conform even to the norms of life expectancy, ‘tearing / out of childhood’ with a shrug, and with a show of charm even for the final fateful boatman to the other world, ‘like she would’ – again that confidential conversational phrase making us present here, bringing us into the family mourning. And with a nod and wink the poem turns sweetly into its sestet.
   That sense of dislocation from normal life is enacted in language and naming throughout the collection, as well as being present in life and death. It opens with confusion and dismay caught in ‘Las Damas’, a small and isolated prose poem centred down in the blank space of the page:

The Ladies? I enquire gingerly, my

first try, not remembering the

more neutral word. But we are in 

the desert, a roadside café shack

off the Panamericano. Out the back,

someone motions. A wooden door

whips open, caught by the wind,

slams fast. Vast sands to left and

right, nothing else–oh, but Mind

the Dogs! someone calls.

The shock must have been intensified for a young woman who had taken a vow of stability in the Benedictine manner, in addition to the normal commitment to chastity, poverty and obedience. Being based life-long in the same convent or abbey was part of the Benedictine spiritual path, freed from the distractions of travel. (Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire was always Dom Sylvester’s base, despite his ecumenical and cultural activism.) This sudden translation from traditional English convent to a desert shack was profound, but there had been earlier ones. Clarkson’s intelligence had brought an academic scholarship to an Anglican girls school, distanced from her many siblings in the Irish-family home, estranged on a daily basis by accent and religion and social unease – recalled in Medlars as ‘Rise and Fall’:

I like Hopkins, I said, shyly.

‘God’s Grandeur… Pied Beauty…

Felix Randall… Henry Purcell…

Hurrahing in the Harvest…

Inversnaid… Ribbledale… The Leaden Echo 

and the Golden Echo – Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves –‘

‘Indeed!’ The Oral Examiner lifted her hand,

then let it drop, and brush – like ah! plushy-velvet –

against my marks sheet. ‘Perhaps now

you’d like to tell us why?’

The contrast of entitlement and sincerity is scathing, and relived here in image and rhythm with delicacy, satire and powerlessness combined. A more recent dislocation is hauntingly described in the earlier collection (p.26). In trauma-like flashback the poet recalls her disrobing as a postulant being readied for her new habit: ‘as she disembarrassed me of one hot layer / after another, tweed, cotton, nylon, loosing / buttons and cuffs, unravelling ties // when she had been undressing me for a month / I dared to say…’. The poem has an erotic charge, and carries a disturbing reminder of the vulnerability of young and idealistic persons within enclosed communities.
   Now she finds herself in Peru, peripatetic and alone in a savage world between desert and sea. Even before this point she has had to change her ‘name in religion’ to Catherine, becoming distanced from the family monikers of Gel, Ger, Germolene, or from her own childhood reversed nom-de-plume of Enid Lareg, specialising in piratical romances on the high seas. Ever the individualist, however, she declines to choose one of the expected Catherines (of Siena or of Alexandria), but opts instead for Catherine of Genoa, both a mystic and a hospital administrator, it seems, but enhanced in hagiographies into ‘a fierce leper-licking patron I was happy to sail a decade by’ (‘Catalina’). This prose poem’s title is their best attempt to pronounce her new name by the Peruvian novices she has probably been sent here to instruct.
    In the Benedictine Order there is never complete silence, but talk is kept to a minimum as a potential distraction from work or prayer. The practice of silence that she now entered into had various implications. Positively, she describes ‘attentiveness to the world around us and receptivity to nature, engendering an open mind and heart. A detachment which, paradoxically, increases capacity for engagement with all our human situations, and for enjoyment of nature’s profusion and exuberance. A full, not empty, silence – comprising all words, just as light comprises all colours.’ More negatively, her own creativity was forbidden: ‘While not permitted to write in the monastery (a diary I started, for psychological relief, was confiscated), I devised a transgressive practice of “night-writing”, writing secretly in the dark, and in the morning destroying the pages I’d written.’ (‘Only Use Words If You Have To’, Culture Matters, 28 July 2020.)
   This practice may have developed her commitment to the prose poem (it saves paper). It also aligns with the creative writing exercise of daily uncensored automatic writing for a set number of minutes, with the results being deliberately set aside unread for months, and revisited only after other poems, perhaps stimulated by the process, have been completed. Writing late into the night might well develop a hypnagogic style, half-awake and half-dreaming, with a dream’s strange fondness for puns and double meanings, so characteristic of her later poetry. With years to practise silence, and to listen to and record that transient inner voice and its imaginings, we might suppose that she became as familiar with her language as a musician might with his or her own instrument. Hence perhaps that quick artistic confidence that was on immediate display when she finally left the convent and was able to respond to her other calling, poetry.
   But silence also takes its toll. News of a personal tragedy comes first to the prioress, who interviews the novice in her private room (‘empty shelves, / a peach bedspread pulled glass-tight’). We are unsure of what has happened, and feel as cut off as the young nun is. ‘It only remains for me to sit quiet / while the details – / the canal – no medication –discovered by the lock-keeper // are chanted above my head / which has become too heavy for my neck / which has curved forwards…’ (‘Ironing Veils’). We are left with an uncertain sense of significance, as if waking from a dream, forced to return with the young girl to her work of prayer ‘(if you concentrate // on the first two notes of each psalm / the crying seems / to be in another room.’) or to the domestic task of learning to iron veils (‘and if you turn up the heat and push down / hard you can press out / an amazing number of // creases and you can stuff / an amazing amount of material / into a small space.’)
    This first collection manages to do exactly that. I am intrigued by the presence within the Benedictine enclosure of the much more outgoing mendicant orders of friars, whose peripatetic work developed in the twelfth century in response to the growth of urban centres and the spiritual needs of the poor there. Several Dominicans find their place in the collection: Saint Dominic himself, Catherine of Siena, Rose of Lima, the Peruvian saint and mystic, and Meister Eckhart, a master theologian whose preaching on the inner presence of God within each person was deemed heretical by the Inquisition on limited evidence. (Again we can find a connection with Dom Sylvester, who studied his writings and co-founded the British Eckhart Society.) And among the Franciscans, Francis of Assisi is given his own astonishing ‘Homily of Francis’, catching plenitude and humble reticence together with a poise that boldly breaks and yet also keeps the vow of its own silence: 

Preach amber, ambergris, preach sweet
pea, purple sprouting, bread. Preach tourmaline
and turquoise, radish. Preach moon’s sprawl, full cream silk,
wind’s punch, yellow, storm, pigeon, squirrel,
monkfish and lawn. Peach.
Preach midnight blue, mackerel sky,
[…]

preach orange fire and white heat, snow, ice,
cacciatore, asparagus, broken crystal only
waterfall, drought, flounce of blossom, only use
bunion-roots, crocodile, hummingbirds, only use words
preach pepper, dance. Preach rocky coves only use words if
and prairies, parsnip bouillon; the violin only use words if you
played in French only use words if you have to

***

Medlars is a markedly different collection. It registers the shock of a return from Peru to Broken Britain, and the strength of mind involved in surviving here. Aromatic and rather quaint, the medlar is a fruit that becomes edible only after it is allowed to over-ripen and rot, and implications for the UK are clear: this society seems ill-omened and past its best.
   Embracing the renunciation of religious life had taken courage, but a greater boldness must have been called upon a decade later to leave it. The cause of this decision is not revealed. Perhaps that will emerge in the forthcoming Dream Island Home for Isabelle Huppert (Verve) originally scheduled for publication before Medlars. But aesthetically the formal contrast between the three-part structure and detailed Notes of Monica’s Overcoat of Flesh and the free-wheeling accumulation of experience in Medlars has a dramatic impact. The longer one stays in an institution, of course, perhaps rising through its career path, the more one sees its flaws and compromises – particularly when it is as hierarchical and patriarchal as the Catholic Church is. One may feel driven to transcend the situation by overleaping the walls that restrict individual or creative life. Yet in another odd sense, Geraldine Clarkson as the daughter of a Francis and a Frances, dedicatees of her first collection, had always been a Franciscan at heart.
   Now the uncertain mendicant life of the poet was before her. She supported herself by work in offices, warehouses, call centres, libraries and care homes, and as a teacher of refugees and migrants, together with the occasionally successful grant application. How better to engage with the experience of others, or to stress the essential worth of the daily struggle for life, than by reframing and sharing it with wit and positive energy through the gift of words? To the formal boldness of her work is added a new realisation of her own vulnerability, past and present. In ‘Even to Kind-Hearted Men’ she observes her girlhood self ‘uncertain and probing, / that broken-fawn look and that motion-blur […] endlessly spinning / on the tip of every decision, / never outright or clear’. The eye of experience sees things differently:

… Then you will learn,

as I have now learned, that seeking to please 

pleases no one. Unshouldered selfhood

weighs others down. And sickly things, even

to kind-hearted men, and boys, exude spices

inciting them to urgent clarity, cuffs and fresh blood. 

Against deference she now presents critique, as in the prose poem ‘Break Break Break’ which takes the Tennysonian laureate voice and rubs his ears in contemporary reality:

O rogue state which has dough-skin flapping about its neck full to

capaz of blue whistled bigotry goitre with it and prorogued. Hounds

leaving flour everywhere like maladjusted cooks rampaging in foreign

cottages. Someone who shoots you down in your own slaughterhouse.

On the facing page, we find ‘S.T. Coleridge Promotes His (Under) Wares’, a poem ‘after – or before – ‘Kubla Khan’ intermeshing lines from Coleridge’s great Romantic poem with women’s lingerie to such bawdy effect so that, for example, ‘caverns measureless to man’ may never be read innocently again. Regarding these two opposing pages we may sense the boldness of this woman’s stance against a poetic hegemony of the male voice. Other major figures that come in for a sharp shock are Lewis Carroll in ‘Underland’ and John Ruskin in ‘Ruskin’s Contract’. Leapfrogging the bent figures of literary greats is an impudent sort of transcendence. But the antagonistic setting of poem pairings on facing pages can be used to lighter effect too. On pp. 68-69, three delicate lines on the common bluebell in ‘Hyacinthoides non-scripta’ are faced by ‘Beryl-the-Peril Bluebell’, which ends:

Stalk joy with your stem

and your airy, fairy bell.

Stick your pistils out

and, in that shot-silk thimble,

ring like hell.

Such contrastive pairings appear frequently enough in the collection to make me wonder about it as a structuring device. The major source of poetry during Geraldine Clarkson’s decade in religious life would be the Psalms, which are read or sung in choir during the seven Hours of the Divine Office that punctuate the working day. The main Hebrew poetic device they use is paired couplets, the second line repeating while extending the sense of the first: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want / He makes me to lie down in green pastures’. In English translation, two pairs (or occasionally three pairs) are linked into a stanza, and successive stanzas are said or sung in turn by opposite sections of the choir or congregation. (I speak from limited experience, in non-monastic settings.) The Psalms themselves vary markedly in tone, from praise to anger to despair to gratitude, and the plainchants used will vary too, but the pairing structure gives constancy, and may have provided a poetic grounding of sorts. This is mere speculation, of course, but it is difficult to prevent a born writer from being aware of the poetry around her, no matter the prohibition of using pen and paper.
   Sometimes opposition is built into the meanings of language itself. In Monica’s Overcoat of Flesh the title of ‘Inis Ní’ seems to direct us towards a critique of W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, with its romanticised Thoreau-esque atmosphere: ‘Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.’ The clubbable Yeats would hardly have survived a week there, but the sense of inner freedom (‘in is free’) resonated with expatriate Irish audiences to such an extent that the poet came to detest the work. Though the island is an actual one on Lough Gill near Sligo, its Irish name of Inis Fraoigh (Heather Island) suggests why it remains uninhabited, underlining the absurd optimism of this horticultural dream. There may be traces here, too, despite his great cultural work towards an independent Ireland, of an Anglo-Irish coloniser perspective. With her familiar West of Ireland roots, Geraldine Clarkson stays closer to linguistic and cultural actuality: 

Call it Inish-nee, nee, with twelve permutations of Nee in ten

generations, six gorse-humped fields, three starved white beaches

with dozens of deep knock-kneed inlets, and seven headscarved

sisters, living together as seamstresses, unmarried, Conneellys.

Bridgie used to come over from their house by boat for Mass

on the mainland. Now a bridge links the two

and she’s stopped practising. Scarlet-sailed hookers cut

the caul of silk water. Weeds stink in the shallows.

No longer making shawls but mending fishing nets and darning

Aran sweaters for tourists, she’s started swearing, her mind like a sewer.

The placing of this poem towards the end of the collection, together with the use of the phrase ‘she’s stopped practising’ (meaning no longer a regular communicant, semi-detached from the faith) might tempt us towards reading this as a coded version of the poet’s departure from the unmarried ‘headscarved’ sisters in the convent, crossing the bridge to secular life where casual or commercial work replaces subtle traditional patterns of life. But that’s too simple. What about the other six sisters, after all, who never joined Bridgie on her weekly voyage of faith? They remained baptised Catholics, part of the clan and the culture. There is irony but not disparagement here. Checking out what this island place-name signifies, we find that Inis Ní might mean various things. Ní could be ‘something’ but also ‘nothing’; it means ‘daughter’ or ‘descendant’; it is a negative verbal particle; but it is also used for ‘washing’ or ‘washing away’ (ní smállmeans a cleansing of stains).
   Each of these meanings resonates. Marginal women who count as nothing in the economic scheme of things are called into being as living somethings, definitely not nothing. These seven aging daughters will not have descendants of their own, but any negativity adheres to economic migration and outdated marriage customs. And the final energetic protest of the single angry sister is accepted, even admired, with moralising disapproval washed away. Bridgie is the echoing bridge between separate stanzas, separate world-views. Her diminutive family name references the powerful Saint Bridget, an abbess in legend linked with ancient Celtic mythology, and the patroness of learning, health, blacksmithing, and poetry.
   Negative and positive are everywhere blended in the encompassing vision of Geraldine Clarkson’s poetry. We recall that earlier, as one of the benefits of silence, she cited a detachment that paradoxically enhances the capacity to engage with all human situations. Acuity and gentleness, sharp-witted tenderness, and a generosity of scope with a wonderful precision: these are just some of the qualities of this remarkable poet.