Monica's Overcoat of Flesh

Geraldine Clarkson

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781911027942
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

This remarkable debut collection from Geraldine Clarkson contains the uncontainable; wondrous, spellbound and daring poems, happy to roam from South American monasteries to the shorelines of memory. These bold, often witty and always hawk-eyed poems survey matters of faith, tragedy and womanhood.

Elaborate, skilful and formally audacious, Clarkson is a poet of extraordinary and kaleidoscopic vision; her writing always richly riotous with detail, her poems possessing the singular ability to move from the maelstrom of feeling to the stilled moment with an assured, quick elegance.

"The speaker of these poems is endlessly morphable and endlessly verbal; she can say anything and beguile us into listening: put our screens down and really listen and come to life again in the garden of her diction, her memory, her weird unassailable vision." – Kathleen Ossip

"... one of the finest contemporary practitioners of the prose poem. A mind-rattling, heart-shaking debut." – A.B. Jackson

[overcoat]

She’ll be Apples

after Julian of Norwich

She shall be apples

and she shall be apples

and she shall in all manner

of thing (and in her beseeching

and in her sleeping and in her

staying and in her going and in her

increasing and in her dwindling)

and in all manner of ways

be apples. Amen.

Vault

...the lesser light to rule the night

– Genesis 1:16

The periods of the Moon are regular,

tight as a bell but tempestuous.

She hurls saucepans, yells, tips cauldrons

of mercury down mountains. Moans.

Won’t answer the telephone. She remembers

being called the lesser light and curls her lip.

Her belly keens, her coolness

gone. Calculations flit.

She gets up earlier. Wakes in the day

hungry for the Sun. Lets loose her shawl

in rivers of silver all over the sea. Drops pearls

on backs of leaves bared to the sky.

Calls out at 1 a.m. No one answers. Hints

at self-destruction. Glints brilliant

but trembles, unsafe. Can’t speak.

Sees a kid with peachy cheeks out late

playing with her brothers in the street.

Narrows witchy eyes and draws, draws.

The girl’s face ruddies as she looks

up: alert, stung.

Nuala, Nuala, Nightwatchman’s Daughter

i. Nuanced—at first—

Nuala brutalised herself after seasons

in the cloister. The finer things belonged on the outside. Nothing

was as it seemed. Where she had envisaged a crucible of white-hot

smoking charity, there was cold marble, clipped vowels, and salad bowls.

There was, however, work to be done. Scales of all kinds

to be dealt with—of fish, a glut every day in the kitchen; of tonic sol-fa,

to lubricate psalms in the chapel; of holiness, to which St Benedict assigned

seven degrees. In her blood was the waking gene, and like her father,

she would glide along dim corridors at night, checking for lights

and fires; blurting a word of solace to herself or some straggler,

alert to the closeness of danger, and of Death coughing his guts up

in the pre-dawn, his body under the blazing Sanctuary light, volted with pain.

ii. Going to St Ives

And then there came seven tripping maidens

who skipped in at the novitiate door, giggling, for lessons.

Lessons were about being holy and they turned round eyes

on each other, gleeful, fizzing. Oh Sister, when I come to knock

on your door, don’t turn away, you’ll create sorrow swam in the air

and, with the deep blue sea safe outside, the devil presented

beakers of pure water, bubbling at the rim, delectable.

~

A lesson was three lilies, at differing stages of growth:

stargazers. One: strumpet, scarlet and proud-petalled,

chintzy, adazzle. We were bade have respect for the second, seedbearing

sister, folded in on herself, guarding her treasure. And even more

for the elder, shrunk into ridges, bleached, dirty, sapless,

with little to commend her. The lilies, that was.

But these things are parables.

iii. Want

Something rotten in the state when tramps are foraging

in our bins, and we finish each meal with an enrobed

chocolate. But there is work to be done: gardening—

only a postage-stamp but the devil in the soil

shooting up weeds like wily leviathans

almost to the height of the spire, unless they’re stamped on.

Also: the moral immemorial weeds, which throttle

the good delphiniums and crocosmia of the soul.

And there’s idle growth at Recreation, a pick-a-back,

a turn about the patio avoiding particular

friendships, an outdoor game of Scrabble,

never accusing the Prioress of cheating

by repurposing letters, or disallowing ‘scut’, or ‘slut’.

iv. WANT (7)

In the elegant minimalist chapel boasting a lump

of amethyst from Brazil, nuns of all persuasions

measure crumbs of Christmas cake; Daniel’s

outer garments; want. And when the laity look in

(‘look in!’) they see our rainbow flesh enrobed

in black and white, glissando

over the ballroomy chapel floor, two by two,

as if entering the Ark. And over the tips of trees

outside the chapel’s high arched windows,

a patch of wet-printed blue, just enough

to make a sailor a pair of bell-bottomed trousers

and quicken a comradely desire to support another

with an oar, with awe, over choppy waters

to a ragged shore. Perfin. Perfin. Perfin.

girl

she broke her childhood over an iron spike;

hid it;

crouched,

waiting to be found out.

no one came.

Monica’s Overcoat of Flesh

Am I still a mother if the girl I reared happened

to sicken and die, fast-tracking there as she did

everything else? There is no w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigrph
• Contents
• [monikers]
• [overcoat]
• [flesh]
• Notes
• Acknowledgments and Thanks
• About the author and this book