Rodin's Shadow

Patricia McCarthy

• Publisher: Agenda Poetry
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781908527134
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Co-published by Clutag Press and Agenda Editions.

The poems in Rodin's Shadow peer into the lives of the great French sculptor's mistresses, dramatically giving voice to Camille Claudel, Gwen John and Rose Beuret, as well as Clara Westhoff, the neglected sculptress wife of Rilke who was Rodin's secretary. These are lives beset by passion, obsession and even madness, but also by devotion, as in the case with his long-term companion Rose Beuret, who Rodin finally married in the year they both died.

"A real page turner."
Tim Liardet Patricia McCarthy was born in Cornwall, brought up mainly in Ireland, and has lived in Washington D.C., Paris, Bangladesh, Nepal and Mexico. A small collection, Survival, was published in the US and A Second Skin came out from Peterloo Poets in 1985. Her work has been widely anthologised and a Selected Poems is forthcoming. She now lives in Mayfield, Sussex.

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‘Liebe Clara’

Word-Bells

Clara Westhoff to Rilke

i

Epistles of light etched in the sky in your beautiful hand

from Muzot, Duino: vast insoluble questions waiting to expand

from jottings whose inner life anchored you to things:

Gothic cathedrals, pressed heather, portraits and paintings –

the Louvre, Jardin d’Acclimatation, Jardin des Plantes…

There you waited for secrets of statues, for streets to descant

to you a syntax wherein you would lose and find

yourself. Castles injected their turrets into your mind

until you could swing words like bells, and women, animals

and earth happened to you like events, important only if capable

of transformation into poetry. You didn’t mind stunting your life

like an unplayable organ – for you clung to the belief

that what you commented upon was taking place elsewhere,

the nearby distancing itself as if painted on silk in an affair

of colours: pearl-grey houses, rainbows of booksellers’ stalls,

brown bindings, green albums matching the green squares, walls

lime-washed with your lines. Stood always as if before

something great, like a painting by Cézanne, its musical score

fixing the vital ground hues, forever removing indecisions,

you invited the sea to impose the sway of its ellipses and elisions

upon whatever in you had become bewildered and confused:

bits of people like brush-strokes the Impressionists used,

the perished animated still, floating in a wind from nowhere,

falling and overtaking each other in a fountain, aware

you were a maker with the roots of centuries in you,

how all the time past, time to come would happen anew.

Liebe und werte Gräfin, Dear Princess, Dearest Friend, Dear Lou,

Dear Clara, Liebe Gnädigste Frau, you wrote. I long to hear from you.

ii

You must feel your emptiness, you said,

like a vacant room around you, like an arch

through which comes breath warm as bread,

scents and solitariness in bottles,

and autumn appearing in rust, gold and red

like a visitor out of season – to create

the wind, its accomplice, overhead,

piling sky upon rushing sky, decorating

lanes with vertebrae of the leaves it bled.

iii

No mourning for you – your task to use

the joys and splendours of life, your Muse,

while old selves enacted miniature deaths,

and your best selves remained at a remove

from the loved one who could not pass away

possessed without possession

to encounter the infinite, breath by breath.

No mourning: grief for the vanished future

an immeasurable legacy ...

Table of contents

• Cast
• Contents
• Prologue
• Waltz with me
• A soft knocking
• False voyages
• Shed wings
• House of fools
• Mistress of Rags
• Two thousand letters in two years
• ‘Liebe Clara’
• Lost footsteps
• Fag-ends
• Epilogue
• Notes