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    This changes things
    This changes things
    This changes things
    Ebook85 pages34 minutes

    This changes things

    By Claire Askew

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    About this ebook

    This changes things is Claire Askew’s first full collection, coming after years of work in Scotland’s flourishing poetry and spoken word scene. Her poems focus on the lives and experiences of women - particularly the socially or economically marginalised - at pains both to empathise and to recognise the limits of this empathy. They embody a need to acknowledge and challenge the poet’s privileged position as documenter and outsider, a responsibility to the poem’s political message and to that message’s human subject. This changes things draws much of its strength from this exploration of inbetweenness. Claire Askew’s purposeful deployment of objects, lighting effects and liminal spaces implicates her reader in the poem’s argument, holds up a mirror and asks us to pay attention. The book’s romantic relationships, depictions of frustrated travel or social mobility, are bound up in its awareness of the systems of power that permit no true state of innocence. Even the final poem, ‘Hydra’ - with its celebration of the body and its senses - cannot ultimately allow us off the hook. This changes things unsettles the homely and recognisable. In its compromised, imperfect characters and narratives, it proposes a radical way of translating neoliberal Britain.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateJan 21, 2016
    ISBN9781780372778
    This changes things

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    • 4/5
      I picked up this varied and vigorous collection of poems by an Edinburgh poet because it was recommended by the staff of Golden Hare Books, an independent bookseller in the same city. I started reading it immediately, continued it on the trans-Atlantic flight back to Houston from Scotland, and finished it when I returned home. It’s a delight. Askew’s subjects, emotional response, and points of view are wide ranging: a house fire, Barcelona seen by the tourist and the resident poor, what it’s like to be a poltergeist, the disconsolate loneliness of small town life where everything remains the same, travel on the American west coast, her love for her grandmother and a collection of grandmother’s sayings, “What a right bag of washing / Bent as a nine-bob note / Twined as a bag of weasels,” even one I heard from my American born Scotch grandmother, “Six of one and a half dozen of another.”

    Book preview

    This changes things - Claire Askew

    Dukkha

    Shelter is the only really necessary thing.

    Every creature has its burrow,

    bolt hole, cave, its fist of twigs.

    Just make it safe, a place

    above the flood plain: shake

    its sticks and slates to test

    it can withstand a storm. That’s all.

    That, and water somewhere near,

    the good, clear kind that scrubs itself

    clean through the stones and flows

    all year without a freeze. Some fish.

    Some trees. A nesting bird for eggs.

    Some plants, a patch of dirt,

    some basic tools. A shovel and a pan.

    But then, your square of soil might spoil

    its seeds. You’ll need blades, some kind

    of beast to slug them through the mud

    in rows. You’ll need to feed it

    from your grain: this changes things.

    You’ll need some cloth.

    You’ll need to cut a bigger plot.

    Now there must be hands to help:

    more hands, more mouths.

    The shelter shrinks, the feed bags thin,

    you need a needle, thread, a pot,

    a kiln, a cart. There must be

    markets, good roads leading in.

    You’ll need a lamp. You’ll need a gun.

    You’ll need a coin. You’ll need

    a tin to keep your coins inside.

    You’ll need a man to guard the tin.

    Give him your gun and get another.

    Make your shelter taller, stronger.

    Now you have an acre, need

    an engine, need an engine shed.

    Now fuel: a sticky, black-eyed well.

    A slaughterhouse, a pit for rotting things,

    incinerator, chimneys made of brick,

    cement. Good rivets, chicken wire –

    no, barbed. A guard. Electric current,

    cashflow. Long flat cabins

    for your hired hands. A bank.

    The shelter must be strong,

    the water pure. The soil must nurture

    tall, true wheat, the hands work

    till the yield is in. The lamp must strike,

    the gun must kill its target cleanly.

    This is all you want.

    This is all that anyone wants.

    I

    I’m sorry I’m still in love with my grandmother

    I’m sorry I’m still in love with my grandmother.

    Creature in curlers, who never scoured

    the pans to your liking; who collected

    the milk off the step in her slip

    and stockings at seventy; who’d take off

    her shoe – stiletto or slipper – to skelp

    an unruly dog. I’m sorry I’m still in love.

    With my grandmother, everything was done

    to extremes. The Christmas puddings, flooded

    with brandy; the flames she kindled,

    a kimono’d Moloch. Cigarettes, their spent ends

    strewn from sink to sofa; the stove with its soup,

    and the grate with a fresh glow at 5 a.m. –

    the house always hot as hell. I’m sorry,

    I’m still in love with my grandmother,

    having been plied with shortbread

    and sausage-meat sandwiches, too small

    to know better. I was seduced

    by the photo-albums, the jewellery box –

    by the sweet-shop, the swing-park,

    the shopping centre. She had so many strategies.

    I’m sorry I’m still. In love with my grandmother

    is

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