Each Other

Clare Best 
(Waterloo Press, 2019); pbk: £12 

In her own life, Clare Best has packed in more challenging experiences than she might have chosen to invite. Welcomed or not, she has faced her trials with extraordinary courage and an important creative verve. Most famously, her approach to her ‘experience of family breast cancer and risk-reducing surgery’ was turned into the remarkable multi-media project Breastless. So, without dwelling on her back-catalogue, it is reasonable to understand that Best is superbly equipped to share the most intimate and harrowing in an unflinching, and yet lyrical way. Breastless has been exhibited and performed throughout the UK and Ireland. 

You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. 
                                     (Louise Erdrich The Painted Drum, quoted in the opening page of ‘Moon House’) 

The poet stresses in her Acknowledgements that ‘The characters inhabiting poems in the title section […] bear no intentional relation to any real persons, living or dead, though it is hoped they may bring some to mind.’ Given her particular publication history, that seems an important statement. Often, prose-writers seem to be allowed to shape a certain truth, which will not necessarily be construed by readers as autobiographical, whereas there seems to be a lingering assumption that poetry written in the first person is almost certainly so. That said, whilst Each Other is not memoir, it is certainly a truth, and one which is frequently brave in its ability to disquiet and not be content to polish up certain standard tropes. 

The collection is in two parts; the first, ‘Moon House’, addresses many family situations, and does indeed touch on matters those familiar with the poet’s earlier work may recognise. Even so, these poems, though outwardly short, stand alone, and deliver a considerable impact. You don’t need to have read the collection’s predecessors, but you may find you wish to explore them subsequently.  

Dark as blood, smooth as melted fontina, 
slick on the tongue, exquisite velvet 
sliding too soon, sweet-heavy, 
down to the heart. 
                                 (‘Hot chocolate at Baratti’s.’) 

As that first section draws to a close the aptly titled, ‘The aftermath inspector’ lays out: 

climb the stairs to wash, and dress 
in other clothes for other work, as people do 
who witness engines burst open in the dark. 

The book’s second, and significantly longer section, ‘Each Other’ is dedicated to ‘all couples‘. In the way that U.A. Fanthorpe’s ‘Atlas’ speaks to the unromanticised patterns of long-term partnerships Best’s narrative sequence charts the conflicts and shared endured times. Unlike the Fanthorpe, however, the relationship in ‘Each Other’ faces significantly more extremity than ‘the Road Fund Tax and meeting trains’. Spliced with ‘the permanently rickety, elaborate structure’ this takes everything to a tipping point, a more dramatic place than these outwardly quiet, short and the usually conventionally stanzaic poems first suggest. The narrative has the feeling of a journal in the relentless chronological build. These poems are rarely long, but despite their place as vertebrae of the lengthening drama, they are also self-contained. Short, yes. Fragmentary, no. 

He shrank to half his usual size. 
She opened the back door 
and put him out. 
                            (‘Night meetings.’) 

Best laces in prose poems, list poems and more, like this, taken from what might be considered a shape poem: 

     she is candle 
                 he is charcoal 

                 both burn 
     when they kiss 
                            (‘the long white dress of love.’) 

What struck me repeatedly, as I try to avoid giving away anything, was the poet’s ability to write a certain dirty realism (though this does not imply graphic), which did not idealise or demonise the central figures in their journey beyond tragedy. Did she achieve her aim of conjuring persons known to the reader through her versified fiction? Certainly, for me, Clare Best did. 

A collection of searing intimacy and spirit. 
 
Beth McDonough