Kate ClanchyKate Clanchy
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Biography
Born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1965, poet Kate Clanchy was educated in Edinburgh and Oxford. She lived in London's East End for several years, before moving to Oxford where she now works as a teacher, journalist and freelance writer. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper and teaches Creative Writing at the Arvon Foundation. She was Poet in Residence for the Red Cross in the UK as part of the Poetry Society's Poetry Places scheme and was a member of the new IMAGES writers' exchange to Australia, organised by the British Council and the Arts Council of England.
Kate Clanchy is the author of two prize-winning collections of poetry, the acclaimed Slattern (1995), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) and a Somerset Maugham Award, and Samarkand (1999), which was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her poetry has been broadcast by BBC Radio and published in various newspapers and magazines including The Scotsman, the New Statesman and Poetry Review. She also writes for radio and broadcasts on the World Service and BBC Radio 3 and 4.
Newborn (2004), is a collection of poems covering pregnancy, birth and caring for a new baby. In 2005 she wrote a poetic picture book for children, Our Cat Henry Comes to the Swings.
Her latest book is What Is She Doing Here?: A Refugee's Story (2008). In 2009, her short story, 'The Not-Dead and the Saved' won the BBC National Short Story Award.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Poetry
Bibliography
Slattern Chatto & Windus, 1995
Samarkand Picador, 1999
All The Poems You Need To Say Hello (editor) Picador, 2004
Newborn Picador, 2004
Our Cat Henry Comes to the Swings (illustrated by Jemima Bird) Oxford University Press, 2005
What Is She Doing Here?: A Refugee's Story Picador, 2008
Prizes and awards
1994 Eric Gregory Award
1996 Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) Slattern
1996 London Arts Board New Writer Award
1996 Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award Slattern
1996 Scottish Arts Council Book Award Slattern
1997 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (shortlist) Slattern
1997 Somerset Maugham Award Slattern
1999 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) Samarkand
1999 Scottish Arts Council Book Award Samarkand
2004 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) Newborn
2009 BBC National Short Story Award ('The Not-Dead and the Saved')
Critical Perspective
As Helen Dunmore has remarked of Kate Clanchy, it is possible to imagine her becoming a genuinely popular poet: her poems are attractively written and accessible, their subject matter frankly full of female hormones. She's certainly among the best, most talked-about women poets to have emerged since the Poetry Society's 'New Generation' promotion back in 1994, albeit with only two volumes so far. Clanchy has marked out a distinctive - arguably post-feminist - poetic territory, dealing successively with love and sexual desire, home-making, and most recently her first child. Emergent young poets are often concerned to deny their mentors and stylistic debts; but she has cheerfully pointed to the assistance of Carol Ann Duffy while also acknowledging the 'nips and tucks' suggested by her first editor Simon Armitage. Their imprint shows through in Clanchy's neat, unobtrusive formal panache (using a lot of Armitage-like half rhymes) and the occasional Duffy-esque male persona piece.
Kate Clanchy's debut Slattern (1995) won awards both nationally (the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection) and in her native Scotland (a Saltire prize), generally attracting a good deal of attention. This was surely at least partly to do with its boldness; the opening poem lists the kinds of males she likes: those smelling 'of apples, hard new wood', who 'snatch life smack from the sky, / a cricket ball caught clean that fills the hand' ('Men'). More subtly explicit is 'The Wedding Guest's Story', spoken by a man attending his former girlfriend's marriage to a rock-climbing 'ex-army chap', and fantasising about climbing 'the slopes of her shoulder blades, / to slump on the summit'. There then follow a number of poems set in school that clearly draw upon Clanchy's own experience as an English teacher. They ironically observe 'the inky boy in the front row desk' who 'writes runes/ in milk on library books' ('Men from the Boys'), or recall 'the lino warming, shoe bag smell, expanse/ of polished floor' ('Timetable'). But gender differences inevitably arise: the boys 'wear gold like armour' and 'high-sided butch-toed things, / with untied thongs and lolling tongues', while the girls' long boots with hooks take 'I'd say, a mirror, / certain music, / days' to get on or off.
Sensuality, concentrated to a high degree, is the dominant theme. This can take unusually sensitive forms: 'the delicate hairs on the nape/ of my neck ... hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet / of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea' ('Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell'). Or just its usual form: 'I watch, remember my body, / braille to your fingers, stroke/ the wayward hairs on my arm' ('Afterwards'). The last throes of a love affair are signalled by trying to care for 'a wrecked street-cat', who turns out to have fatal diseases beyond their control: 'I know I cried. / There was not enough between us / to keep a cat alive'. ('Towards the End'). Desire may have been gratified, but the more settled pleasures of domestic life still await, in Clanchy's highly accomplished - if inevitably less intense - second volume.
The prevailing subjects of Samarkand (1999), despite its exotic foreign title, are home-based emotional commitment, the satisfactions of assured monogamy. But for once, a book's blurb is accurate: Clanchy's poetic range really is extended dramatically. There are travel poems, describing actual journeys ('The Bridge over the Border') or imaginary ones ('you might find Scheherazade ... / and Al-al-Din's gold-plated domes / slung with Soviet tourist signs'). There are poems about distant ancestors and more recent ones ('His head was grand and mottled as a planet ... / Grandad looked like old Duke Wayne / and shot birds with the Earl of Cairn'), as well as elegies for friends who die 'young, young, all Bogart, American' ('Deep Blue'). Significantly, there are also a number of poems about children; a little girl tragically disappears into a snowman built by her father ('Record Low') and an expectant couple notice that they appear to exchange weight between them: 'He grew thin as she grew great' ('Nine Months'). Perhaps the best single poem in the book is 'Guenever', an amusing, skilfully rhymed piece comparing Sir Galahad's sex appeal unfavourably with 'his battered troubled Dad':
'And I have seen Sir Lancelot
snatch a moth from its lamp-bound orbit,
cage it in his palm adroitly,
blow it dusty, puzzled, free -
and all the while keep his eyes on me.'
The collection concludes with a sequence of poems, 'The NewHome Cabaret', celebrating a couple's moving into their first house together. They are redecorating and in the process revealing its past, the handiwork of previous inhabitants. The couple intend to have it pared down in 'the best spare modern style', yet bits of the old style keep emerging from cracks to place their pretensions in an ironic light. Pulling out an old newspaper from the gap it is filling brings soot and the skeleton of a trapped bird crashing down: pages from a 1954 Daily Mirror have as their headline 'Modern Housewives' War on Dust' ('Hardboard'). Clanchy's preoccupation with fantasy houses actually refers back to several poems early in her first book: 'I have / applied myself to the plan of our dream house' ('Designs'), and 'the sort of house you have in dreams, / a thousand rooms, one corridor' ('A Married Man'). Her concerns in 'The NewHome Cabaret' are more practical: 'Something leaks / behind the light, falls on our sheet, sparse / as the first sand in an upturned hourglass' ('Dust'). 'The Tree' is a quietly moving final poem, tying together a sense of place with a feeling of permanence: 'We live here now.../ this is enough. We are / the lights / the lights, the lights / the trains flick by in the dark'.
Clanchy's poems in a recent issue of Poetry Review are again essentially family-based, dealing maturely with both ends of life. She holds her child while hearing about the death of her father's friend ('Aneurysm'); then 'content to tote the baby homewards' answers, 'rook-like', his hoarse calls ('The Burden'). Whether this necessary preoccupation with domesticity will develop a sinister Plath-like edge in future seems unlikely: Clanchy is an unusually affirmative poet, as well as being an accomplished and enjoyable one.
Dr Jules Smith, 2001
Contact information
Publisher (General enquiries)
Picador
Pan Macmillan Ltd
20 New Wharf Road
London N1 9RR
England
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7014 6000
Fax: +44 (0)20 7014 6001
http://www.panmacmillan.com
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