Samarkand [Kindle Edition]

Some of the questions we might ask in reading this book are, after the debut volume 'Slattern', what has changed? what has developed? and what has been left behind? In an obvious sense, which the reviews here pick up, the poems in this volume are coming from a different place: although the focus is still often on men, these are the poems of a married woman (the sequence which ends the book concerns the setting up of a household). But rather than evaluate the book just by this criterion, we should ask whether the poems show a development as poems, eg. formal constructs made up of interesting chains of signifiers, engaging our attention as aesthetic or acoustic objects. The answer is that they do: the poems here are better than those of 'Slattern'. Although the pattern is still predominantly iambic, and the Larkinisms of the first book are still present ('Nine Months' borrows the syntactic trick of 'Mr Bleaney': 'if he stood... i don't know' / 'and if he thought... was something not discussed'; the first poem plants us straight into the train-catching, half-way world of 'the whitsun weddings') - there's a great subtlety about some of the rhythmic effects achieved here: for example, the opening lines of 'Conquest': 'Like mapping the ocean with ribbons / like sticking a flag on the moon / like finding a new range of mountains / and deciding to split them / into right-angled regions' - the way this sets up a kind of light-verse, vaudevillean rhythmical scheme but then subverts it in the fourth line; the way the half rhyme 'ribbons-mountains-regions' echoes through the lines; the way 'split' picks up but modifies 'sticking'.... this is really good verse. But Clanchy has ideas and themes too: although the book can be comfortably read in the parochial Armitage-Duffy school of contemporary poets, it excels these people in its genuine engagement with the messy business of colonialism, and gender relations, and travel versus rootedness (again, Larkin's 'The Importance of Elsewhere' seems to be a kind of subtext to the book'). The two poems at the centre of the book, 'Spell' and 'Conquest', are energetic acts of re-claiming the spaces typically occupied by the male act of writing (which is often about writing women, dictating female identity), and reveal too how this poetic act is often complicit with movements of sexual or political conquest (see also 'The Currs'). This is a very accomplished book.

Readers of Helen Fielding will know that the world is made up of singletons and smug marrieds. Readers of Clanchy's GUARDIAN column will know which category she falls into. This is competent but rarely startling poetry, which never quite succeeds in convincing us that moving in with your boyfriend is exciting to anyone except yourself. But hey, I'm just a bitter Bridget so what do I know?