Rain On My Skin by Rosemary Clewes/ Review
Rosemary Clewes’ collection, Rain on My Skin, shows the poet’s accomplished and evocative voice – wise, yet fresh and childlike, especially when expressing her love for and fascination with landscapes and the natural elements. The author maps her connection to nature over a lifetime with pastoral imagery amid universal themes.
Examples of some of the work's best are Song for Stamm Woodlot, Beaver Pond and Caught Out, which expresses the frustration and powerlessness many felt during the Covid pandemic.
“Clouds, over-massing the blue and I already deep in the woods, where the tepee of stripped logs leans into its smoke hole,” she writes in Caught Out. “A pattering quivers the leaves yes I knew the rain and before the bridge I hoofed it up the hill to the highwood, where from a great distance a drumroll, ever louder, closed fast. I stood there under the trees letting all of it, the downpour, the canopy’s load in the shiny dim keep douse my head.
Waiting for Covid to tire of our flesh does nothing for my pen. Rain is what I have been waiting for, to be caught out, to be reminded of rain on my skin.”
Clewes’ work often touches on endings, in the personal sense and within nature, tinged with sorrow and nostalgia. A great example is the poem Braille about the end of one summer.
“No inkling after sunshine and swimming. No time to adjust to this new season’s watery voice – the same wind-slapped shore, boat-house heave and happy slurp between the piles, yet not at all the song of summer’s idyll. Recognizing its chromatic tone, I read another kind of braille - veins rewriting the back of my hands in rivers of blue, my ripened skin.”
The poem Heart Attack after Edward Carson, bursts urgent with emotion which is made more intense by the concrete poem’s fragmented structure. “I am eight feet burning up the noontime road . Heart ripples still but moving as memory remembers and dis remembers its shape. . . . Blurring sight throat ache melancholy so deep my father’s life hovering between a knock and a delivery.”
Clewes is a sensory, effusive poet. Her lyrical words reflect a deep musical sense. In the third section, Calle Obispo, the poem of the same title, references Nobel Prize-winning poet and Polish-Lithuanian author Czeslaw Milosz. The first stanza turns a plane trip into a spiritual experience.
“Snowy Jasmine and Clivia cups of sunset bloom in their leafy shirts on my studio floor. Stasis, bundling the leaded light most days, closes round trees wired to sky in bare verse.
I buckle my seat. A band of turquoise streaks in the dawn sky, dividing the plane’s window. Heading south. This much I can get right, the adjectives I’m used to, the feeling of closure that frames a season.”
The poem The Ice Is Going was composed from the deck of a Russian icebreaker streaming north to a fiord near Ellesmere Island. The two-verse poem is composed in staggered lines that look much like a ship’s silhouette.
Once again, the poet uses powerful, yet lyrical language to describe her natural surroundings, where “ Devon’s coastline gathers the flat-topped mountains in, their monasteried massifs of stone growing skirts of scree. Here is the heart of magma’s forty-eight-million-year boil – continental collisions birthing mountains, Ordovician clay, in a blink, spinning new tales. Kyrie, kyrie sighs the dry wind. The relic landscape.”
The poem, In Spite of Limits, employs whimsy to elevate a childhood lesson to the universal. “I was tall for my age. Legs skinny, ankles weak. It was decided I should figure skate. For years I scored my edges deep, gathering speed until the wind whistled in my ears. I longed to leave my body, arrow into the air’s weak arms. Discovering that split jumps have their limits never stopped those cosmic leaps.”
The book is both a history and memoir, Clewes writes in her notes, where “Memories of my athletic exploits interweave with family love and loss.”
Rain on My Skin, published by Aeolus House, is her fifth book of poetry and prose. It is a treat for the heart packed with subject matter that engages.