For when words fail us: a small book of changes
Claire,Beynon, The Cuba Press, 2024

They agree, it’s not so much
that we put down roots
in a place.

It’s that a place
puts down roots 
in us.

 

Claire Beynon
from ‘Scrambled eggs & straw for the fire’

One of the many joys of poetry is how it is an open field of possibilities: how we score a poem’s music, interlace its subject matter, play with its form, reveal and conceal, draw upon other genres, invent and philosophise. As poets we become so many things. In Claire Beynon’s haunting new collection, poetry enters the terrain of memoir, narrative, travel, conversation, imagination. It is a book of here, and a book of there, a book that sends me back to the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Keith Jarrett’s extraordinary Köln Concert, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

A woman meets a man at an exhibition opening in New York, she from New Zealand, he an American, and their conversation continues online over the ensuing decade. They talk about paintings, poems, writing, books, sharing here and there by emails, over the internet. But a visit to New Zealand, and what lies under the skin of conversation, becomes more unsettling.

The shifting fonts in the sections of the book reflect the shifting seasons, the way the narrative refracts, prism-like, to touch upon different states. Trust, obsession, estrangement, entanglement, jealousy, storm, gentleness, the unrecognised, the unspoken.

Certain words are crossed out, making the internal editing process of the poet deliberately visible, as though we are shadow-tracking the poet’s need to find enough clarity to write knots fractures schisms epiphanies. To speak of the movement between his ‘beloved’ and his ‘obsession’.

(..) She’s grateful to the oceans
and continents for defending defining
the distance between them

 

from ‘Scrambled eggs & straw for the fire’

In her endnote, Claire tells us the book is ‘a work of memory and the imagination’, that the anonymous man is real, and some of his words are included with his permission. As I read slowly, I am haunted by the way the poetry is navigating distance and gap, yes the space between USA and New Zealand, but also between man and woman, knowing and unknowing, attaching and detaching, repairing and restoring. Perhaps I read this as bridge writing. Between the sections, Claire quotes a stanza from ‘The Waking’ by Theodore Roethke, and includes a mirror image of the stanza. And here I am gain, musing on how a poem might be a means of refracting experience, seeing it in multiple surprising lights. And if I return to Theodore’s poem, writing a poem might also be: ” I learn by going where I have to go.’

This gentle, slow-paced reflective collection is both leaving and arriving, holding close and letting go. A haunting of bridges indeed.

All that remains is this—
this concentrate of poems
drawn tight around the heart.

 

from ‘What falls away is always’

Claire Beynon is an artist and writer living in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her poetry, flash fiction and short stories have been widely pub-lished and anthologised in Aotearoa and abroad. She has been a runner-up in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and in 2002 was the winner of the NZ Poetry Society’s International Poetry award. In 2021 her poem ‘Today’s Sky’ was awarded the Takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize.  Claire combines the contemplative rhythms of writing and art-making with a range of interdisciplinary collaborations. Two summer research seasons in Antarctica continue to inform her work. Her first collection was Open Book: Poetry & Images. Website

The Cuba Press page