Gregory Kan, Clay Eaters.
Clay Eaters is a beautiful book in every possible way, including the design, with the cover image beautifully capturing that sense of submerged, mysterious, lingering beauty I am so taken with in the poetry. Like all of Gregory Kan’s collections, this is a layered collection pulling together readings from other texts into an uneasy and resonant relationship with more autobiographical material. The collection begins with a satellite view of an island, an unusual perspective for a book of poetry, and the group we focus in on, “attired strangely,” and looking “like we have walked a very long way,” “like we don’t know / Where we have come from at all,” might be companions in a dream, or in a fictional universe that, at this stage, could be either a utopian or a dystopia, or perhaps a combination of the two. This sense of other-worldliness, of a dream-like intensity and shimmering danger and desirability, never leaves the work, even as we come to recognise the realism grounding these super-saturated details, the layered stories we move between: stories in italicised prose from Uncle Boon’s Blog, stories of Madam Dai channelling spirits, and the autobiographical stories that also bring the past into the present, whether it is the more distant past of a military training “specialising in camouflage and infiltration,” or the more recent past when the deeply beloved Gilgamesh still ruled from the wooden post he loved to perch on, more like a bird than a cat.
Gilgamesh is a powerful presence in this collection. Eventually another cat does enter the picture, and I want to read the poem introducing Halford:
It was a while
Before T could convince me to think
About getting another cat
I wonder if you and Halford would have gotten along
He’s an old boy, a year older than you were
He must be able to
Smell you in parts of the house
Although he loves us
He was also marooned
And I wonder if early on
Your old desire paths would have given him some comfort
As he crept through this alien place
This is a collection that is full of its own desire paths, alert to the desire paths of others. It is a collection about making homes in alien places, and noticing the strangenesses inherent even in the most familiar; it is a collection full of perspectives, so that we find ourselves moving from aerial views to cat level, though even what cat level is changes, of course, from cat to cat, moment to moment. And desire paths are necessary because we are all marooned – the line “He was also marooned,” that is, marooned as well as loved and loving, could read, with the lack of punctuation, “He was also marooned,” he as well as surely his owners were, in this new life without Gilgamesh, in this life that – as the collection as a whole reveals – has involved so many departures and moves, so much history. The very next poem in the collection presents a moment of being “Awash after an archetypal family feast,” once again finding a place in the extended family, adjusting to the new ages everyone is, “Piecing our dreams together / in a wild mosaic / a basin / for other dreams.”
I know my dreams will be haunted by Gregory Kan’s poetry, as they have been after reading each of his two earlier collections, each one of his books launching a renewed and ongoing obsession with his work, a haunting of myself by lines and images but somehow also, and even more, by the spaces between them, the sense of mystery and depth that attends all his work and lingers on after reading it, the gap between the lines of the page as you read them and the after-effects as they swim into your dreams and into odd moments of your daily life.
Order it from your bookshop or from the press
Other enthusiasms
Clay Eaters is a beautiful book in every possible way, including the design, with the cover image beautifully capturing that sense of submerged, mysterious, lingering beauty I am so taken with in the poetry. Like all of Gregory Kan’s collections, this is a layered collection pulling together readings from other texts into an uneasy and resonant relationship with more autobiographical material. The collection begins with a satellite view of an island, an unusual perspective for a book of poetry, and the group we focus in on, “attired strangely,” and looking “like we have walked a very long way,” “like we don’t know / Where we have come from at all,” might be companions in a dream, or in a fictional universe that, at this stage, could be either a utopian or a dystopia, or perhaps a combination of the two. This sense of other-worldliness, of a dream-like intensity and shimmering danger and desirability, never leaves the work, even as we come to recognise the realism grounding these super-saturated details, the layered stories we move between: stories in italicised prose from Uncle Boon’s Blog, stories of Madam Dai channelling spirits, and the autobiographical stories that also bring the past into the present, whether it is the more distant past of a military training “specialising in camouflage and infiltration,” or the more recent past when the deeply beloved Gilgamesh still ruled from the wooden post he loved to perch on, more like a bird than a cat.
Gilgamesh is a powerful presence in this collection. Eventually another cat does enter the picture, and I want to read the poem introducing Halford:
It was a while
Before T could convince me to think
About getting another cat
I wonder if you and Halford would have gotten along
He’s an old boy, a year older than you were
He must be able to
Smell you in parts of the house
Although he loves us
He was also marooned
And I wonder if early on
Your old desire paths would have given him some comfort
As he crept through this alien place
This is a collection that is full of its own desire paths, alert to the desire paths of others. It is a collection about making homes in alien places, and noticing the strangenesses inherent even in the most familiar; it is a collection full of perspectives, so that we find ourselves moving from aerial views to cat level, though even what cat level is changes, of course, from cat to cat, moment to moment. And desire paths are necessary because we are all marooned – the line “He was also marooned,” that is, marooned as well as loved and loving, could read, with the lack of punctuation, “He was also marooned,” he as well as surely his owners were, in this new life without Gilgamesh, in this life that – as the collection as a whole reveals – has involved so many departures and moves, so much history. The very next poem in the collection presents a moment of being “Awash after an archetypal family feast,” once again finding a place in the extended family, adjusting to the new ages everyone is, “Piecing our dreams together / in a wild mosaic / a basin / for other dreams.”
I know my dreams will be haunted by Gregory Kan’s poetry, as they have been after reading each of his two earlier collections, each one of his books launching a renewed and ongoing obsession with his work, a haunting of myself by lines and images but somehow also, and even more, by the spaces between them, the sense of mystery and depth that attends all his work and lingers on after reading it, the gap between the lines of the page as you read them and the after-effects as they swim into your dreams and into odd moments of your daily life.
Order it from your bookshop or from the press
Other enthusiasms
