This week's poem, "Clothing," is by the Devon-born poet, Annemarie Austin. It first appeared in On the Border (1993), and is reprinted in Very, an unusually titled, and uniformly impressive, New and Selected Poems published by Bloodaxe in 2008. Catching up recently with this collection, I found myself marking poem after poem as a candidate for Poem of the Week, not a little unnerved by the prospect of choosing a single piece to represent a writer of such subtlety and originality. Austin deserves to be far better known, and I warmly recommend the collection as a whole.
She writes memorably about West Country landscapes and seascapes, the weather, the moon landing, rooms, birds, paintings, and, with a passion that owes nothing to political fashion, lives diminished by circumstance or expectation. These are hardly unfamiliar poetic fare, but Austin's response is unpredictable and fresh. A concern with the tricks and distortions of perception seems native to her, and gives the work a contemporary thrust. Particularly characteristic is her knack of representing psychological phenomena through metaphor. In "Clothing", the metaphorical vehicles – moon, onion, winter clothes, snowball, snowman – are simple and ordinary-seeming, but their combination is startling. Most importantly, the mysterious processes they literalise are not rendered less mysterious.
In the beginning, the tone is drily amused and distant. "Correlation," for example, belongs to a register associated with scientific discourse. The address to "you" in line four, however, tunes the poem to a more personal setting, suggesting it was urgency of emotion that needed, first, to be suitably "clothed" and "compacted".
It's interesting that "moon" in line three lacks the usual definite article, as "earth" often does in idiomatic speech. This is deliberate, and adds nearness and depth to the image. The moon's association with the Muse is clearly relevant.
So what is the "object" the poem summons and addresses? Reference to "essential you, the person where I started" suggests an oblique love-poem, and that the drily-envisioned "object" is human. The allusions to the dream clothing that "pulls on the neck and shoulders" in stanza two, and to the "snowman-building" in stanza 3, seem to reinforce this interpretation. Even so, the "person" evoked might be metaphorical. It could represent desire. It could, in fact, be the moon.
The symbols the poet chooses are characterised by layers: some of these objects are light, like the onion and the snowball, some heavy. The poem enjoys conjuring with the idea of weightiness. In line three, "perhaps, they say, you are not so very weighty", but, in the middle stanza, "weight" is assertively combined with "freight" for the poem's only full rhyme, and the freight, which has been increased by dreams, is imagined in terms of heavy winter-wear. Now the speaker, the imaginer, is also subject to "clothing". The layers represent, I think, perception and imagination, the way in which our minds submerge a desired "object", and our own selves, in interpretation.
The fascination with light versus heavy is mirrored in the last stanza's concern with expansion versus diminution. Imagination may amplify, or it may work the other way, to distil an essence. Perhaps the second line echoes Yeats, who clothed his own muse in such mythical and magical colours: "I have spread my dreams under your feet." Austin, again, is gently humorous, contrasting the privacy of the imagined figure with the splashy impact of a celebrity, whose arrival parts crowds. Finally, the assiduous imagination is all ready to clothe the image again, with "half at least a cloakroom's worth of coats." That there is some kernel of reality inside the layers has already been acknowledged in the reference to the "living centre" in stanza one, "where the green shoot waits its moment, nearly stifled". There, and in the wry humour of the subsequent metaphors, lies an acknowledgement that the intense imaginative work of desire distorts and constricts, while intuition tells us it liberates and enlivens. Because that very acknowledgement is allowed into the poem, it seems that the art of balance striven for in the opening lines has been achieved, and that the clear air of reason circulates between the layers of rich poetic imagination.
Clothing
There should be, I assume, some correlation
between each object and the desire it calls
to itself, like moon dragging tides along behind;
but perhaps, they say, you are not so very weighty,
I've clothed you in layers like an onion's coats,
desire on desire, distorting your living centre
where the green shoot waits its moment, nearly stifled.
I don't know. Nightly dreams increase the freight,
complexity, compile a past we do not really share
in every kind of setting, every age; the huge weight
of them pulls on the neck and shoulders, hunching
both of us; we are attired for several Arctic winters.
Yet at the grain of the snowball, somewhere,
there is essential you, the person where I started.
Smaller perhaps, compacted, distillation of the colours
I have spread to make you from, taking less space
in passages and hallways, surrounded by less air
and echo everywhere, quieter; crowds do not part
inevitably letting you through nor do admirers gather
for your arrival… except me, equipped for snowman-
building with half at least a cloakroom's worth of coats.