Review
Josie-Anne Gray
To The Lions
Claire Meadows
In this third collection of poetry from Claire Meadows we see the writer revisit some of the themes she explored in Gold After, a collection that had an intense and at times harrowing quality about it. To The Lions is no less an intense collection and challenges the reader with its unflinching journey through painful places. The result is worth the challenge as the language is powerful, taut and inventive throughout and the collection has a pleasing unity and sense of completeness.
At times I wondered if the fight taking place within the poems was a metaphysical as well as material fight with the voice being as much at odds with God as she is with herself and her other more earthly adversaries. The biblical motifs and allusions recur throughout the collection, often reflected in the titles of the poems and in what can be seen as Christian iconography and the imagery of martyrdom. The lions of the title are ever present and I get the sense that the voice is exploring the notion of being thrown to the lions and of how one recovers from that; not unharmed for sure.
The idea of prey and predator recurs in the collection. The voice is often moving among lions, sometimes without knowing she is prey, sometimes fully aware. She has no external protector and is often unable to protect herself. She seeks redemption and enlightenment and often seems unaware or oblivious to her own value. There is little solace or comfort on offer as mother, sister, lover and God himself let the voice down and she is thrown on her own resources and initiative. One of the most challenging aspects of the collection is that there is no comforting resolution, no escape into a better world. The final poem, Neophyte, in which the neophyte is a convert to a new system of belief, she is still ‘thrown to the bottom/ Of a new world.’ The ‘dark room’ is ominous and the prevailing memory of the ‘candle-lit prophet’ implies that the danger is still not over.
The first time I read the collection I saw a great deal of pain. The poems felt raw, painful and deeply personal. On returning to them and spending more time with each work I saw their unity and the way the themes arc. The microcosm is personal but the macrocosm is more universal and metaphysical. We travel from innocence to experience via martyrdom, sin and sainthood with sustained motifs and imagery that create coherence and fluency.
Although martyrdom and suffering are central to the collection, the voice never feels sorry for herself. She has great energetic verve and resilience plus a caustic wit that sustains her even when she is in spiritually and materially dark places. The voice is a clever girl who sometimes knows she is prey and goes along with the scenario as if observing herself cast in the role of victim. She is no doe-eyed Red Riding Hood. She is worldly, almost too worldly for her own good at times.
The darker side of sex is a difficult subject to manage as a theme. There is the risk of slipping into a Sado-masochistic trope with the behaviour of the protagonists pre-ordained. The writer avoids this by maintaining an assertive tone throughout. In Blood Season the voice explores female sexuality subtly. The juxtaposition of ‘fire and balm’ implies the pain/pleasure dichotomy while the noun phrase ‘blood season’ signposts loss of innocence, menstruation, birth and its opposite, death. At the end of the poem the voice makes a clear statement of fierce, knowing intent, ‘This dance, I do it for you only. For you.’
The opening poem With You sets the tone for the collection as the reader is immediately wrong footed by ‘a lazy burr of summer’ which creates pastoral expectations only to be undermined totally by the placing of ‘desolate’ prior to the introduction of the biblical motifs in the image of the ‘sin shadow.’ This poem could be about first love and its inevitable hurt but it also implies the start of a tricky relationship with God. This is returned to in Herald where the subverted Christian image of ‘knowing blood as wine’ placed at the heart of a work of great turbulence suggests a battle royal with the divine. The ‘herald’ is an ambiguous figure, bringing messages of both good and bad news.
Intimate is one of the most devastating poems of the collection. Its title is ironic as the last thing the voice finds is intimacy. The vulgar ‘nuzzle-crotch intimacy’ suggests pleasure being one way. Later when the voice takes herself to task, ‘Claire do you see,’ this marks the prelude to the horror of the final stanza where the voice says ‘But I must go in again/It makes me…’ She is then punished, ‘tar on my soul…you press the feathers/Into my sides.’ The violence of tarring and feathering creates an inversion of angelic imagery and leaves the reader anxious as to the fate of the voice who has been rendered so abject.
In Creation the poet is alluding to Genesis but something more as well; the nature of myth and how we create everything including ourselves. The final line of the poem, ‘and you can wear all the jewels you want/Their hearts are cold after all,’ stuns the reader with the power of the image and the starkness of it intent.
When the poems veer into the territory of family the pain becomes more visceral as real wounds appear. In Sister the voice ‘cut myself. But only by accident,’ and her suffering is dismissed as trivial, ‘Get off the phone, someone may have died.’ The cruelty of the familial relationships deepens in Jack-knife when the blade again is present and ‘cut through a vein.’ In Glass the finale to what appears to be a familial trilogy the mother is depicted as vicious and spiteful, hurling her daughter’s gift directly at her to leave a mark. The daughter keeps the broken object as ‘Testament.’
Claire Meadows takes her reader on a dark and at times savage journey through a smouldering, hellish world where smoke, fire, illusion and disillusion play their part, obscuring the light, keeping the voice in a state of perpetual darkness. This collection is unrelenting and brave for it. Some readers might find the darkness overpowering. I found it strangely familiar in places and never once lost empathy with the troubled soul winding her way through dangerous terrain with the claws of the lion never more than a hair’s breadth away.