Clare Shaw, Towards a General Theory of Love
(Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2022)
Clare Shaw’s new, prize-winning poetry collection is their finest yet. And I say this as a keen reader of all of Clare’s books, which include Straight Ahead (2006), Head On (2012), and Flood (2018). Towards a General Theory of Love inhabits an aqueous space, rocked by grief, anxiety, and despair, but also the promise of tenderness and love. Survival is not enough; poetry offers healing.
This is no easy task. As Clare alludes to time and again, words often fail. Trauma has a unique ability to dampen speech, undermining the foundations of the inner-home. We weep at the harshness of history and of a God who is ‘cruel in the name of love’. Words can erode attachments to significant Others. Clare’s poems circle around the behaviourist experiments of Harry Harlow in the 1950s and 1960s, where he removed infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers and raised them in social isolation. In one experiment, the surrogate mother was made of wire and wood; the monkeys quickly showed disturbed behaviours, including self-mutilation. Clare reflects on the absent mother (‘You were not wire. You were not wire’, says the monkey-narrator; you were ‘the seed and the leaf and the fruit’), the social isolation of Covid lockdowns, self-harming, sexual abuse, and words that are ‘sharp wires’ lining ‘the bars of a cage’. There are also words that act like the iceberg that sank the Titanic. A lover’s farewell ‘tore a hole down my side,…. The orchestra did its best/but they all drowned’ (‘The Titanic Reflects on the Recent Ending of a Long-term Relationship’). Without love, we all go down.
Words are important for memory. In ‘Abcedarian’, words and phrases are broken, they float away from each other. Memories are distorted, aphasic. Clare entreats their mother and grandmother to speak, just speak. In ‘Letter to My Mother’, Clare agrees to leave ‘all the bad stuff to one side’ in order to talk about ‘the importance of very good manners’, birdsong, and ‘how many skips of a stone you could make on the water’. But the poet also wants the mother to speak about how it felt ‘when the stones fell out from your walls, when the path faded, when your world softened and lost its edge’. This theme of love and loss continues in ‘Elegy for My Grandma’. Clare evokes memories of ‘hot milk before bed, two biscuits’, the grandma’s ‘high and quavery’ voice when she sang, and ‘the sin in her smile’. This was before the grandma became ‘a field/with no footprints in it./ The silence of snow. No one there’.
Words are ‘a river’, Clare observes (‘Letter to My Mother’), but water flows away as well as towards. In these poems, there are lakes and rain and sea-waves and tides and streams and storms and pools; water holds us but also transports us; it pulls us in and pushes us out. Love is ‘where a river meets the sea’. However, as ‘What the Goldfish Taught Me About Love’ notes, ‘water can be toxic/ but escape is lethal’.
Clare’s technical intensity is palpable. The exquisite control of tempo in these poems result in readers unconsciously synchronising our breathing with that of poet. We, too, are left gasping at the beauty of snow while, in other poems, our breath (like that of the infant daughter in ‘Child Protection Policy’) becomes ‘shallow and warm…/ the whole world swam in its tide’.
No-where is this effect more evident than in Clare’s poems about grief for the loss of mother, grandma, lover. Grief often requires a pared-back language. In ‘This is a very small poem’ about the death of Clare’s mother, Clare refuses to ‘squander a word… there is nothing of excess here no drama…. no adverbs’. The stark rhythm and space heighten the final, breath-taking lines: ‘I can still hear the screaming/it is elegant in its restraint’. In other poems, metaphors flood the text. Clare has little time for the ‘stages theory’ of grief. Clare approves of Julian Barnes’ comment that ‘Grief is the negative image of love, and if there can be an accumulation of love over the years, then why not grief?’ In ‘Morecambe Bay as Grief’, grief is as limitless as water in a lake: if a person turned on the tap in a bath, it would take ‘twenty million years’ to drain. Clare is clear, however, that this unimaginable stretch of time is deceptive. People must ‘keep an eye on the time’ because the landscape is ‘treacherous, people have died here’: there is quicksand and ‘fast-rising tides’. There is hope, though – and it lies in simple things, not the infinite universe. ‘You will need a guide’, Clare advises, but ‘there is kindness here’ as well as chips and arcades. There is also intergenerational love: ‘you could teach [your daughter]/ how to skim stones’, similar to the way their mother skipped stones across the water in ‘Letter to My Mother’. This is the dialectical love of attachment and separation. ‘Never will you not be my child’, Clare tells a much-loved daughter in ‘Child Protection Policy’ even though this love will require handing over matches and emboldening the daughter to ‘Now make fire’. Love is building fires, drinking from springs, sleeping with a lover in a hut in a forest (‘Monkey Teaches Me Map-Reading Skills’).
Towards a General Theory of Love speaks to (and with) people who have suffered trauma. Perhaps this is not surprising. Clare creates poetry from their own pain, past and present. Clare has empathy and compassion in abundance, as well as respect for the diverse ways people communicate their experiences. This is what makes Clare’s writing workshops so powerful. Together with prize-winning author Winnie M. Li (the founder of the Clear Lines Festival), Clare harnesses poetry to bring questions about consent and sexual violence into public discussions. Clare believes in the power of words – not only to harm, but also to heal. The title of Towards a General Theory of Love is important. The ‘Towards’ indicates that love, as well as grief, are not final destinations but forms of travel, battling through storms and floating on sea-waves. The prelapsarian utopia of ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ when ‘we were not ashamed of our skin./We lay in the grass and you smelt of sun/And what happened between us was holy’ was real, but the lovers had already eaten from the tree of knowledge. Towards a General Theory of Love are poems to read and reread, to think about, and read again. They are a gift of love and grief, both of which are lakes that we ‘will walk by forever’.
To learn about Clare Shaw’s new poetry, writing workshops, and other activities, see @ShareClaw.