John Wedgwood Clarke’s collection Boy Thing is broken into two sections I Boy thing l-XXXIII made up of thirty-three poems and II Fathers and Sons 1-VIII made up of eight poems. Titles for the poems would help orientate the reader at times. A curious fragment opens the collection: ‘I made of silence a porcelain bell, / trapped a fly and waited for it to die.// In the gap between bell and sill, / its feet still move, now, then now’. The fly represents the secret the speaker feels he must keep as a young boy; in poem XXIV we learn what the secret is: ‘It comes in the post and stinks to high heaven,/ the belt from the Mediterranean / heat of his affair... // I wrap it in a bag and hide it like my cut of a crime...’ The father disappears earlier in poem IX: ‘The bedroom blind bright red, my father / enters the room: look after her - / then gently closes the door / on his voice.’ At a reading of Boy Thing, Wedgwood Clarke confirmed writing the collection had helped him to make sense of the past and to find some peace with it; the fragment at the end of the book shows it has been a release: ‘Words have made of me a porcelain bell / in the shape of a dancing figure. // I ring it — a slight sound. The fly / knocks twice on the glass and is gone.’ When hearing these poems read, I was struck by their tautness and rhythm. In poem II, the reader is transported to the father’s shop:

He lets me count the takings. I build him
colonnades of silver and copper,
turn the Queen’s head right way up
on crisp and furry banknotes,
sellotape the torn, the biro-tattooed
smelling of sweat and tobacco

‘Crisp’ and ‘furry’ refer to some notes being new, others worn, but I questioned whether banknotes were ever furry which took me away from the poem. Irrespective, this is a family struggling to survive financially: ‘What we take pours away like the stream...’

Occasionally the poems are too elliptical in places and pronouns are dropped when they are needed, for instance the beginning of poem I: ‘Our shop is known for the home-cooked hams / my father bags with honey and spice, / floats in the blackened sarcophagus...’ I kept reading this and it didn’t feel grammatically correct with ‘floats’ and I felt it needed to read ‘they float’.

Wedgwood Clarke grew up in Cornwall and the river Stennack runs through these poems, as does the motif of religion: ‘St la’s chapel’; ‘Ark of the Convenant’; ‘chapel of pain’; ‘I swap my daily prayers / for fishing book and tackle shop’ to name a few. ‘Hollow’ and ‘empty’, and variations of these words, recur in this collection as the speaker tries to make sense of the father’s absence. The mother is largely absent from this collection which Wedgewood Clarke said was a conscious decision. However, in poem VII her birthday surprise is met with her husband’s cruelty: ‘She bakes a hazelnut meringue / a strawberry for each of his years… // … She buys me a book and he / throws the book at us. Forty-seven / sharp hard local strawberries / Choke on them, why don’t you.’

The Fathers and Sons section left me wanting more. Although the washing line as a ‘tree of life’ could be more original, Wedgwood Clarke’s love for his sons sings in poem VIII:

The cool white shapes sway and brush against me,
pegs holding edges and my longing
for the weight of their bodies on my belly,
shoulders, knees, as they turn and stream in a flat
and filling dance, the joy I cannot hold.

I defy any reader not to feel the unbearable ache in this section’s opening poem: ‘O father weather. O risen wind’ And in the depiction of the speaker with his sons and his father in poem IV: ‘They have held my earlobe reins as I held / onto you swaying like a camel… // ... I have no coat equal to your sheepskin’s… // ... It was the last shelter of you I knew...’ In poem V the speaker still has the coat: ‘I’ll take from it//the last two buttons, amber-grey horn...’ Boy Thing is a devastating and wondrous collection that shows how difficult it is to overcome being left; the sense of abandonment runs throughout as does the need for connection. Poem XIX sums it up: ‘I don’t know how to write / the feeling; how I’m apart with them // looking back boy windowed / in a carol of longing...’