I knew Shirley McClure for one week, a year ago. I met her on a writing course where she’d come with her friend Jane Clarke. Shirley was physically frail, recovering from treatment for her cancer. Physically. Not mentally. Not spiritually. Not any other way at all. Funny, feisty, didn’t miss a trick. I opened up my Facebook posts this morning to find she has died, and I couldn’t breath properly for a minute. Shock. Disbelief. Hadn’t I seen photos of her earlier this year…river swimming, full of health, or so it seemed. I have lost a lot of friends this year. I want to rage against the dying of the light, but that does no one any good, after all. So this is to say thankyou to and for Shirley McClure.

Here’s what I wrote about her in April this year:

In a few weeks I’ll be back in the blue house in the middle of the picture. Almaserra Vella, in the village of Relleu in Alicante. I’m not sure I need an excuse for posting it, but I do have one. Because it’s the house where I met today’s guest poet..a year ago, on a writing week tutored by Ann Sansom. She’s not the first guest from that week. We’ve met Jane Clarke and Martin Reed, and equally, another guest who I wouldn’t have met but for the Old Olive Press…my friend Hilary Elfick. I’m not sure why it took me so long to ask Shirley McClure to share her work with us. However. Better late than never.

By way of introduction, then, a story I thought twice about sharing, and then decided it was too good not to. You know how it is at a writing workshop. Deep concentration, silence, the susurrus of paper, the scratch of pens. Sighs. The creak of a chair. And the task. It wasn’t one I associate with Ann Sansom…she’d given each of us a postcard of a portrait. The task was to adopt the voice of a character in the picture, or to create a stream of consciousness sort of thing. I got the equivalent of a ‘Hello’ photoshoot of three languid landed sisters by John Singer Sargent. Shirley McClure, it turned out, had been given one by John Waterhouse ….one of my favourite painters…..of his favourite model, in the guise of a nymph or a mermaid or a minor deity or a dryad. He did a lot of those. Anyway, it was one of those spells in a morning’s writing when I sort of drift off, my mind elsewhere, and folk were reading their drafts, and suddenly I was startled by this sardonic, no-messing Irish voice saying

‘John;  I know you want to ride me…..’

Since then I’ve read Stone dress, and found myself brought up short, and sometimes close to tears, by the poems about mastectomy, about the relentless business of cancer and its treatments, by lines like these from A marriage: ‘At home we made delicate love /watchful of bandages’, or from Photoshoot ‘ Nurses rave about the handiwork, / scars are praised…..yours is the best we’ve taken……there is more than one way to find fame.’

Bloodaxe poet, Katie Donovan describes that voice for me when she writes of Shirley’s recitations of deadpan lust. That’s the word I wanted: deadpan

But that ‘John, I know you want to….’ was the first time I heard Shirley McClure reading.  I’ve said before that it’s the voice that sells me the poem, and I’ve also said, more than once, that the Irish have an unfair advantage when it comes to voice. Not all the Irish, I suppose I should say. Not the Irish of the Falls Road and the Shankhill, where every vowel sounds like a grudge or a grievance . But it’s that drily sardonic Irish voice that I hear when I read so many of Shirley’s poems, and I love it. I like the drawl, the vowel song.

And now it’s time to introduce her. Born in Waterford in 1962,  Shirley lives in Bray, Co. Wicklow.She studied English Literature and Spanish at Trinity College Dublin and undertook a Master’s degree in Latin-American Studies at Liverpool University. She went on to do a variety of jobs including volunteering in a mens’ hostel in Liverpool; teaching English as a foreign language in Reading, Dublin, Vigo and Quito; tutoring in literacy and creative writing at the Dublin Institute of Adult Education and Tosach, an AnCo centre in Dublin’s inner city; project work in Focus Point (now Focus ireland) which included drama, literacy and counselling; teaching English to Vietnamese refugees in Dublin. Since 1992 she has been a natural health practitioner and teacher. She practices shiatsu and aromatherapy (see http://www.shirleymcclure.com) and works with a number of community and holistic organisations, teaching and facilitating groups. She also teaches creative writing with a particular interest in writing and health.

Shirley’s collection, Stone Dress (Arlen House) and her CD Spanish Affair, with her own poems plus poetry and music from invited guests, both came out in 2015. All proceeds from the CD go to Arklow Cancer Support Group, where Shirley facilitates a writers’ group. Her first poetry collection, Who’s Counting? (Bradshaw Books) won Cork Literary Review’s Manuscript  Competition 2009. She won Listowel Writers’ Week Originals Poetry Competition 2014, and the title poem of her new collection, ‘Stone Dress’, won the Penfro Poetry Competition. And now you’ll be wanting to know why she’s a prize-winner. Time for the poems. She’s sent me a slack handful from Stone dress, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

The first one is typical of her clear-eyed unflinching gaze, and the diction that tells you exactly how to listen to the poem.

Engagement

Nurse dresses the wound,

we talk hormones, oestrogen,

how the levels will drop

like water in a summer pool

that yields only a dry ring,

a glaze of salt.

She says I can swim in salt
water, now that the wound
is healing; she says to ring
if there’s a problem. Oestrogen
used to be my friend. The pool
is out of bounds, but I can drop

down into the waves, swim till I drop,

crawl out covered in salt.

Sea water gathers in a pool

at my feet, and even the wound

shines. Sunbathers beam oestrogen,

and I stand, hopeless in a ring

of bare-breasted women. Can’t ring

any nurse about this. Can’t drop

out of the world because of oestrogen.

I change in our room, taste salt.

My sun-dress won’t cover the wound,

I pull on an old t-shirt, curl up by the pool.

You find me at the pool.

Still not used to your ring –

the ring came before the wound,

before the floor dropped

out of the world, before salt

baths and the war against oestrogen.

– Was it the oestrogen                                            

you fell for, or the reflecting  pool,                

or my image conserved in salt?                         

Would you rather I gave back the ring,                

would you rather we dropped                               

the whole plan? I wound

you with questions, wound with oestrogen,

the drops I have left, run from the pool,

your ring glued to my finger with salt.

It was Kim Moore who made me try to write a sestina, and it was Kim Moore who explained that what a sestina is ideally suited for is the exploration of an obsessional idea. Which is exactly why this poem grips and grips and won’t let go. That, and its echoes of the mythic, of women turned to salt, of the iconography of rings, of the lost, like naiads by pools in legendary clearings. So many layers, and always, always, rooted in the here and now, the unavoidable. Stunning. By contrast, the next one is in what feels like more familiar territory, and what makes me think of Heaney…and, indeed, of Jane Clarke. A poem full of love. And, I think, the only poem I know about table tennis.

Best Of Three

When it first came in, they’d use cigar box lids

for bats, a champagne cork for a ball.

They played it after dinner, as a parlour game,

the fathers back from India keeping score,

the uncles in their uniforms shaking hands.

Our dad taught us how to hold the blade,

coached us on how the sleight of hand required

to spin the ball depended on your stance,

your handshake grip, the flick of wood and rubber,

showed the three of us the chop, the loop, the kill.

Jack Frost  was outside but we were holed up

round the table in the echoing house, and sweating.

Everyone played, even Uncle Arthur, whose hands

big as mill wheels dizzied and spun the spectators,

each grateful for the pipe-smoke lightness of the  ball.

Last night in the Parochial Lodge, my hands shook

as the ball danced away from me. New rules,

faster, up to eleven only and  two serves each.

Slowly I corrected my footing as though

my father still stood by the net, score-keeping.

I’m hooked right from the first line; if this was to turn up in a bunch of submissions for a competition I was judging, it would go straight into the ‘probables’ pile, just for that first line. Ah, the power of the pronoun, that artful ‘it’. And then, like Heaney’s father, digging:   my father……….scorekeeping.  Lovely. As is the next poem.

Katie Donovan says of Shirley McClure’s work in Who’s counting: “Quirky and wise, studded with razor-sharp double entendres and droll fantasies, these poems introduce a refreshing new voice in Irish poetry. Fuelled by a combative curiosity about the underbelly of human relationships, this is a poetry of candour and folly, and ultimately of discovery. Themes include sexual jealousy, bereavement, and how a woman regards her physical self. …….. Here is a poet sure of her craft, ready to share incantations of desire and domesticity with poise and elan. From recitations of deadpan lust to the sensitivities of one who is flying on the margins of mortality, the poems in Who’s Counting? become friends whom we cannot resist revisiting.”

I hear the voice that I heard a year ago in Spain whenever I read this poem.

The Kiss

I could have been

a better student – learned Lorca

from the library stacks,

not lying

on the shag rug

in the lecturer’s flat.

I half-listened to his Verde,

que te quiero verde,

knowing he would kiss me later;

half-believing that his tongue –

its twist and roll

around my own –

would transmit linguistics,

short-cut me

to fluency.

It’s the laconic bit about the shagpile rug in the lecturer’s flat, and its guiltless trangressiveness that makes me laugh, and then feel slightly guilty about. My bad. As one of my granddaughters says. But she writes sexy poems as well as harrowing ones does Shirley McClure. I’d like to share the whole collection ( all these poems are from Stone Dress)…but then you wouldn’t need to buy it, and you really, really must. So, just one more.  I wanted to share one about hoovering, but wordpress can’t cope with the formatting of a shaped poem, but I’m just as happy to share this one instead.

The Amorous Cat

 The Amorous Cat bookshop in Aigburth

closes its door for final time

– Liverpool Echo, 2012

Do you ever take a walk in Sefton Park,

browse in the bookshop on Lark Lane?

Is there still a bookshop on Lark Lane,

are any lefties left in Sefton Park?

Do you ever have occasion to remark

to Fabiana, Donna or Lorraine

how much you miss la lucha, the campaigns,

the prisoners’ letters, every Saturday a march?

Or could it be you never settled down,

that when you said don’t ever contact me

because I can’t forget you, that you meant it,

mean it still; oh, but I hope your Liverpool’s a town

grumbling with bookshops – that you’ve forgotten me,

just as I’ve kept my promise – written this, not sent it.

Actually, it’s nice to finish with a love letter, however bittersweet, rather than falling down a flight of stairs with a hoover.

Find out more about Shirley McClure’s via this link

http://www.thepoetryvein.com/

and her books

Who’s Counting? from Amazon’s Book Store. … Paperback: 63 pages; Publisher: Bradshaw Books £9.00

Stone dress [Arlen House 2015] from Kenny’s bookstore:  http://www.kennys.ie/  €13.00

My apologies. We’re a day late. You’ve waited with enormous patience, and all I can say is: your patience will be rewarded. To start with, you won’t have to wade through any ramblings on things poetic, and that’s because our guest has sent me an embarassment of riches. Lots of big satisfying poems, today, and little for me to do but crack on and introduce him. Ladies and gentlemen: Mr Tom Cleary!

This is some of what I said about him on his first visit to the Cobweb in November 2014:

It was the first of several posts when I reflected on a poet’s voice, and Irish voices (North and South) in particular, and how I’d once met Seamus heaney by accident and heard him read, and bought him a pint:

“……..most of all, I remember the voice, the one that tells me how to hear every poem of his that I ever read thereafter. And realising that poetry was an unfair business, and there were poets born with a headstart, with gift of a certain kind of dialect or accent, absolved of the curse of RP.

It’s something I think of particularly whenever I hear an Irish poet reading. Frank Ormesby was one. James Caruth is another. They are voices made for poetry, in the way I think that voices like Garrison Keillor’s and Bill Bryson are made for prose storytelling. It’s difficult to describe the quality I’m thinking of. It’s not the fact of a tenor or a baritone voice. It’s the business of rhythm and of softened consonants and the space that’s given to vowels that does it for me. (Harrison’s consonants are nailed down, if you see what I mean. They don’t compromise. They put an edge on the words). I’m thinking of the way the lines come in a series of waves, often the rise and fall of three or four syllables, almost regular but never metronomic, like small seashore waves. A bit like the patterns of Anglo Saxon poetry, but more spacious. The result is always unassertive, unemphatic, and it has both authority and authenticity. Like I say, it’s an unfair advantage. I could listen to them reading catalogues and bus timetables.”

Try to keep that in your mind when you read the poems that come later.Tom Cleary is an Irish poet who lives in Hebden Bridge. When he retired after teaching for many years in secondary schools in England, he started to write poetry. In 2011 he won a poetry competition organised by Writers Forum and HappenStance, and his prize was the publication in August 2014 by HappenStance of his pamphlet, The Third Miss Keane.

In 2015, he won a Northern Writers’ Award as one of six New North Poets. [I was personally much heartened by this…Tom, like me, is in his 70s, and we both come late to writing seriously]. In 2016, one of his poems, ‘Black’, was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. In May of this year, he promoted, organised and fronted the highly successful ‘Irish and Irishness’ Poetry Reading at the Bradford Literature Festival in which he was also one of the 7 poets on view. He gave a public reading at the Poetry School annual launch in London in April, and at the ‘Poetry at the Parsonage’ poetry festival in Haworth in July.

[An aside: that Irish and Irishness was a remarkable affair, held in   a ballroom in the Midland Hotel in Bradford. A room the size of a football pitch, all mirrors and chandeliers. Like I imagine the Titanic. A massive audience, and a line up that involved Anthony Costello, Ian Duhig, Peter Riley, Kim Moore (temporarily granted Irish citizenship)..and Natalie Rees, who I seriously hope will one day agree to be a guest on the Cobweb. He sits well in that kind of company, does Tom. As his poems will now demonstrate.

When he was here last he let me use a poem from The Third Miss Keane …it starts innocently enough

Goose

I saw her first at the bridge where we went

for the dancing. Her legs leapt to the frenzy of the fiddles.

They all wanted her but she chose me.

Come with me for the goose, she said.

But that last line is anything but innocent, and the poem goes on disturbingly, in the dark way of folk tales. These two endorsements give you the flavour.

‘In the neo-folktales of Tom Cleary’s The Third Miss Keane, we see a refreshingly off-kilter voice from we expect great things in the future.’ – Poetry Book Society

‘The poems in The Third Miss Keane often feel slightly surreal, or fairy-tale like, but they always have their own inner logic’ – Kim Moore.

Tom’s latest poems move in new directions, but the roots and the voice are constant I think. Though they grow darker. The first will feel like nearly-familiar territory if you know ‘The third Miss keane’.

Mrs Cassidy

When the Cassidys came to the house next door, my brother Ferdie

fell in love with the mother. Through a delicate wine glass

pressed against the wall of his room he listened to their couplings.

How can she love that hairless creature? How can she let him touch her?

He stalked her through the markets on Saturdays. At night

he stood motionless behind the dark hedges of our garden

and watched her bedroom light go on and off.

He knelt behind her at mass, his nose nuzzling her hair.

Her heady perfume of musk drugged him into a swoon.

Later at the summer fair, he fell desperately in love

with the Headless Lady. Once we went together to see her,

shuffling and bumping through the crowded tent on tiptoe,

our sandalled feet numbed in the wet grass. In the deep shadows

of the tent behind a low balustrade she filled her Windsor chair,

snug and cosy. I couldn’t take my eyes off

the tangled cluster of tubes and wires pouring out of her neck.

Ferdie was enraptured by her stillness, by the soft slow movement

of her thighs beneath her ample skirts, the even rise and fall

of her breasts. He saw advantages in a lover not having a face.

When should I make my move, Cis? I could say nothing.

When the fair moved on at the summer’s end, he locked himself in his room.

Downstairs we listened to his sobbing, frozen in our chairs.

I love the texture and rhythm that underpin this dark, surreal, or fairy-tale like story, the doubt about who is telling the tale, and the narrator’s appalled fascination at the brother’s be-wilderment. He can tell a story, Tom Cleary…a story with lots more questions than answers, and one validated, like ‘Goose’ by the matter-of fact credibilty given by their opening lines.

The next poem shifts us from a rural Ireland into a more documented and documentary urban Ireland.

War Photo

Policemen in black and helmets squat on their haunches.

One sits on his bottom, legs spread, staring through a Perspex face shield.

They look like small boys in costume playing jackstones on the road,

skidding lumps of broken paving over the tarmac.

Beyond them there’s a woman in a striped sweater,

a man in a shirt as white as an advert,

figures with blank Os for heads,

like mannequins in a field to frighten birds.

A screen of metal with a mesh of gauze

hides a delicate blur that might be a child.

And Michael may have been hunched for hours, nursing his camera,

stepping back and sideways to avoid the bricks,

steaming cups of tea between the heels of his mittens.

Then these two women promenaded through holding hands.

One, her face fat with flush,

bundled her raincoat with her handbag under one arm,

and pressed the older woman’s hand to her thigh.

The companion blinked through the flash of her glasses

and surrendered her hand as if it was no longer hers.

It almost looks staged, back-projected from a comfortable suburb

where people had more time to talk

about supermarket bargains and boozy nights out,

Grania’s wedding and a June flight to the Canaries.

A shift of place and shift of voice to match. It seems to me that this poem nails down that dreadful quality of banality, the way violence becomes mundane, the complex fears and determinations that lie behind flaccid cliches, like ‘Life must go on’. Because Auden shone an unforgettable light on the irony of that. Atrocity happens anywhere, and the torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In details like

a man in a shirt as white as an advert,

and

figures with blank Os for heads,

like mannequins in a field to frighten birds.

and

a delicate blur that might be a child.

Tom makes you look again at what you thought was familiarly forgotten.

Lest you suppose that Tom’s landscapes and narratives are necessarily ‘Irish’, it’s worth pointing out that he’s also lived in Spain, and that there are harder, harsher landscapes than the greys and greens of Ireland. He’s also recently been setting poems in Russia, and in snow and ice. But this one I was pleased to have because it showcases Tom’s power as a storyteller.

The irises in the arroyo

When he drove me up into the mountains that night

a sickle moon hung over the peaks in the blue-black velvet of the sky,

but he never let me see his face.

The locals ignored me.

They just turned away and looked down

as if they’d got a whiff from the cloacas.

But then they turned against me with a vengeance

for no reason, talked behind my back,

spread rumours about my relations with Carmela.

I went into a crowded bar and everyone fell silent.

I met them in the street and they deliberately showed me their backs.

I grew so weary of their endless fiestas,

the fiesta of the witches,

the fiesta of St. Agatha with no breasts,

the fiesta of the nun miraculously pregnant.

And of their third-rate music.

And of their dead wild pigs stinking of dung, their rank jabali.

And to listen to that uncouth language, all day, all day,

snapping like storks’ bills, clack, clack, clack.

Never to hear your own tongue spoken.

You practise it in your head but you lack the muscle to hold it.

My language is a cheese in the attic, nibbled away.

Anonymous notes typed in lower case used to come on plain paper.

I thought someone was on my side, but it was just old Q4

up to his tricks, his never-ending game of loyalties and betrayals.

Now they’ve stopped my money.

This is when they send a man.

I jump at the crack of a tree in the wind,

or stones rolling on the roof, or a crow squalling.

I watch every day for the man and I’m too old to run.

I lie in bed listening for his footsteps.

In the market yesterday, I saw a face I knew.

I ran at him but they closed ranks and blocked me.

All night the rain’s been bucketing down

on my lean-to kitchen, pounding the plastic sheeting.

Its grey smoking curtains have wiped out the mountains.

The irises in the arroyo are sunk.

I have no idea who is telling me this story, but I’m convinced of his authenticity. I could spend hours inventing a backstory, and an ending. I want to make a film of it. It reminds me of Graham Greene. It reminds me, too of Cormac McCarthy. It’s jammed with anxiety and hopelessness. It reminds me of that Bob Dylan line ‘In the hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes’. In fact, it’s another line of Dylan’s from Desolation Row that jumped into my mind when I read the next, and last,  poem: they’re selling postcards of the hanging

Waiting for the General

Carts were abandoned at roadsides.

Unmilked cows trumpeted their pain from the byres.

Soldiers jammed the street with their grief, psychotic saints.

Some walked in a dream, gun hands dangling.

Others waved their arms recklessly like burning brands.

Women wept and threw themselves on the ground,

filling their slack mouths with gravel.

Others held their palms out cupped to catch rain.

I left and I walked to the vaulted rocks

and I watched the spring ooze around the flat plates.

I eased myself into a green wash of water.

When the serpent rose up before me, swaying and humming,

its skin of oil and water rippling,

I measured my frame against it, and I cut it down.

I’d love to know what you make of this, how it suddenly swerves beyond folktale and into fable, how it ends with an image straight out of a pre-Rapaelite catalogue.

I hope it won’t be too long before Tom Cleary has another collection published, but in the meantime, if you don’t already own it, I do urge you buy

The third Miss Keane: [Happenstance 2014]  use the link:

http://www.happenstancepress.org/