
Best Scottish Poems 2004 Introduction \| The Poems \| Acknowledgements

The poems

Kate Clanchy

Source

Author's note

Editor's comment

Biography

Love

I hadn’t met his kind before.
His misericord face – really,
like a joke on his father – blurred
as if from years of polish;
his hands like curled dry leaves;

the profligate heat he gave
out, gave out, his shallow,
careful breaths: I thought
his filaments would blow,
I thought he was an emperor,

dying on silk cushions.
I didn’t know how to keep
him wrapped, I didn’t know
how to give him suck, I had
no idea about him. At night

I tried to remember the feel
of his head on my neck, the skull
small as a cat’s, the soft spot
hot as a smelted coin,
and the hair, the down, fine

as the innermost, vellum layer
of some rare snowcreature’s
aureole of fur, if you could meet
such a beast, if you could
get so near. I started there.

Source

First published in Poetry Review, 93, 3, autumn 2003.
From Newborn (London: Picador, 2004).
Reprinted by permission of Macmillan, London, UK.

Author's note

‘Love’ comes from my book-length sequence of poems Newborn, which is about motherhood. The poems were written at different times during my son’s first three years, and this is one of the last, written when I was remembering the chaotic first days with a baby rather than actually experiencing them.

New mothers are expected to ‘bond’ with their babies instantly: I found the process slower and stranger, and this is the record. ‘Misericord’ is the only odd word here, I think, – they’re those grotesque little figures with caricatured faces carved under the seats of choir-stalls. The title may seem rather bold and bald, but this isn’t a conventional romantic poem. And after all, love is what it’s all about.

Kate Clanchy

Editor's comment

Lovely poem about the mother’s puzzling encounter with her baby, this alien. I like the repetition of ‘gave out’ to mirror its breathing.

Hamish Whyte

Biography

Kate Clanchy was born in Glasgow in 1965 and educated in Edinburgh and Oxford. Slattern won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and Samarkand was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She lives in Oxford with her husband and son.

Her latest collection is Newborn (2004), a collection of poems covering pregnancy, birth and caring for a new baby.