kate clanchy

Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell

This is simply to inform you:

that the thickest line in the kink of my hand
smells like the feel of an old school desk,
the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;

that beneath the spray of my expensive scent
my armpits sound a bass note strong
as the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;

that the wet flush of my fear is sharp
as the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,
on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,

in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the nape
of my neck, just where you might bend
your head, might hesitate and brush your lips,

hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet
of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.


i meet kate clanchy briefly earlier this year after a pre stanza reading. i don't normally go for the meeting of the poet thing but, given i've only the most vestigial sense of smell, i was so taken with the above poem that, once she'd finished, i felt i had to tell her. which obviously wasn't creepy at all! but i did get the impression it wasn't the first time it had happened, indicating perhaps the surprising prevalence of anosmic type conditions and possibly the lack of writing describing it.

anyway, i was quite taken with la clanchy, not just because she seemed decent but because she falls into that small group of women who constitute poets of my age. so not only did i get some of her poetry but, as i was in tesco's the other day, thought i'd give her latest, antigona and me a whirl.

and glad i was of it. the book, prose not poetry, features the relationship between clanchy and her helpmeet/friend antigona, an albanian refugee. true clanchy's london existence is not to me as distant as that of the albanian mountains but both are distinctly not my mode of being so either portrayal was of interest. clanchy was unflinching in highlighting the many conflicts in her middle class existence and its effects on people like antigona while at the same time doing a good job, i thought, in portraying antigona's transition from the stratified world of her birth into the confusing one of london.

it'd be easy to dismiss, esp seeing it on the shelves as tesco, as another chick book but it really isn't and is well worth a look if only to remind ourselves of the cossetted and privileged nature of our existence. i like the domestic world clanchy creates in her poetry. it's a difficult trick to get right and she succeeds in transferring that to this work without any of the faux sentimentality that clogs so much of its equivalent.

cheap at tescos. buy it!

*the poem comes from canchy's collection slattern. you can hear ot being read here at about 9:30 tho it's not clanchy and has annoying piano music