Poetry Diary feat. poem by Elisabeth Sennit Clough

By Kim Moore

For the last week I’ve been away in Scotland with my husband and daughter - it has been a week filled with rain and un-forecast sunshine, and lots of driving on narrow roads that wind along the side of lochs and past mountains with tops covered in mist and green everywhere - thick vegetation and ancient woodland.

We’ve been staying in a house in the Highlands, courtesy of a friend. I was very excited to find a copy of My Name is Abilene (Salt, 2023) by Elisabeth Sennit Clough, a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while. I met Elisabeth on a residential voice coaching course that Ledbury Poetry Festival ran - this was many years ago. More recently, I saw her from afar reading from the collection at the Forward Prizes, as the collection was shortlisted for Best Collection last year.

On the back of the book, John Greening says that the collection is ‘almost a verse novel’ and I agree with this - both because of it’s page-turning qualities - I read it all in one go, cover to cover as if I was reading a novel, but also because of the way Elisabeth uses characters to hold what is a fragmented narrative together.

First of all - we have the character of Abilene. In an interview with the Poetry School, Elisabeth explains that after studying John Berryman, she wanted to experiment with the idea of persona. She entered her full name into an anagram maker and it came up with ‘Abilene Fluorescent nightclothes’. She then in her own words ‘stepped into the persona of Abilene, and she became an imaginative extension of my life and personality’.

I have always loved the idea of creating a persona or character and writing poems from them or in their voice. Some of my personal favourites are obvious - Crow by Ted Hughes for example, also Mr Mouth by Christopher Reid and Skeleton Man by Martin Kratz. One glaringly obvious fact is that these are all male poets - at the moment I can’t think of any collections written in the voice of a persona by female poets other than this one. I’m sure lots of people may be able to put me right on this, so do add them to the comments at the bottom if you have any suggestions!

Anyway, the Abilene of this collection seems so full of life she could walk off the page. The first section of the book is called ‘Before John’ and in the first poem we read ‘one day you’re a child / the next you’re carrying one’ and the scene is set. I’ve been thinking a lot about the portrayal of women in poetry - about passivity and activeness, perhaps because one of the things that bothered me in the writing of All the Men I Never Married are the many instances that the speakers of those poems were silenced, or allowed themselves to be silenced, or stayed quiet or still.

When I was working on All the Men I made a failed attempt at writing portraits of women. I was worried that it wasn’t very feminist to write about men all the time, but every time I tried to write about women, it felt like I couldn’t see past the men! I wondered why I couldn’t write about my mum, or my nanna, or my sisters, why I’d grown up in a family of women but couldn’t stop writing about men. That, I suppose is kind of the joke of the title - that there is only one way for women and men to relate, and that is sexually -I hope that the book then pulls that notion apart.

Although Abilene is broken-hearted, she is not passive. The world does not always just enact itself upon her. Even in the first poem, when we discover she is pregnant at a young age, at her work in the potato factory, she is ‘the tail / on a spine of older women / who share their wisdom’ and it is her belly that ‘prickles with love /I’ve found inside the spinney’.

Abilene is nobody’s fool either. In the second poem ‘the box of maternal recall’ she writes ‘the way the women in your family have always played to men / who call girls women and women girls’. Isn’t this a fabulous two lines that sums up the infantilisation of women and the sexualisation of girls. It holds to account the men who do these things, and shows how women ‘play along’ to survive.

Another recurring character, a thread that hangs the collection together is loretta, abilene’s sister. One of my favourite poems in the collection is ‘loretta likes to know people’ - a wonderfully drawn, funny, acerbic, sharp portrait of loretta, with a cracking run on first line from the title ‘even when she’s already made her mind up about them’.

In ‘the livestock dealers’ in the voice of a girl with a violent and abusive stepfather we read

but there was no way out of that house 

where he made me watch him grope her 
& i sat in the girl of my body

a squatter in someone else's story

Lines like these make me catch my breath in recognition - ‘the girl of my body’. There is something in the character of Abilene though that is always active, always pushing against the lot she has been dealt - she is never merely passive. Even in the section above, the last line shows that Abilene was aware that this was not her story, that she didn’t belong there, but was merely living there for a time.

In this first section, the poems are in the voice of a first-person speaker who could, or could not be Abilene. The second section, simply called ‘abilene’ are all written in the voice of abilene, and addressed to the eponymous John, who it turns out, is, well, a bit of an arsehole, and also married, but not to abilene.

Despite John’s narcissistic behaviour, Abilene often seems to get the last word, or the last laugh - she is feisty, sharp-tongued, often funny. In ‘abilene spreads manure on her roses while listening to power ballads’ she addresses john directly at the end of every line. The repetition of his name somehow creates both comedy and pain, anger and sarcasm all mixed up together.

and i turned up the volume john
to everything i do i do it for you john 

until we ended john
my pretty flowers all in a fucking row john 

I thought I'd share the title poem of the collection here to give you a sense of the collection, but also a sense of abilene, who feels like a real person that was inhabiting the house in the highlands with me.  

As an aside, I found this lovely interview over at the Poetry School with Elisabeth, which you can read the whole of here.  She talks in the interview about the creation of Abilene, explaining "I'd always wanted to experiment with the idea of persona since studying John Berryman during my MFA.  I entered my full name (first, middle, and surnames) into an anagram maker and one of the phrases it gave me was ‘Abilene Fluorescent nightclothes’. I challenged myself to write a poem from that prompt and the title poem of the collection was the result. I stepped into the persona of Abilene, and she became an imaginative extension of my life and personality."

I love the declaration in this poem, how unabashed it is, that activeness again - 'I wear fluorescent nightclothes' and 'i believe in the sadness of rivers' and 'I don't forgive the water authority'. That stamping of the 'i' that runs through this poem, the invented 'i', the magical 'i', the poem as a stake in the idea that any 'i' is constructed and built on shifting sands.  

This poem seems to call on a rich lineage of other writers as well - the 'sadness of rivers' and the ouse crawling towards the ocean makes me think of Virginia Woolf, and how she died.  It also makes me think of 'who's who' by Tomaz Saluman, and 'Song of Myself' by Walt Whitman - perhaps any poem that builds its strength on the lightning bolt of the 'I' would pull these poets into my mind.  

I have been thinking this week about the use of verbs in poems - how some verbs just work perfectly. During my MA with Carol Ann Duffy, she told us repeatedly that 'verbs are the engines of the poem'. Or perhaps it was 'verbs are the batteries of the poem'.  I love this idea - that some words are the ones that drive the poem forward, that keep momentum going through their inherent  quality as words, not through leaning on narrative. Of course this can backfire sometimes - sometimes we can use a verb that is so unusual, or ornate or ornamental that it can hold the reader up - it can draw too much attention to itself - it is too ostentatious.  Although it also occurs to me as I write, that perhaps what is or isn't too much is a matter of taste.  Anyway, I love the way Elisabeth uses the word 'saucer' as a verb half way through this poem. She writes 'there was a time i wished to slip beneath a steady current / and saucer down to the mud...' 

There is lots more to say about this poem, but I think I will finish by calling to your attention the act of transformation, or one of them anyway that happens between the beginning and the end of this poem. Perhaps this sums up why I like Abilene as a character so much - her refusal to stay 'crouched in the dark corner' - where we find her at the beginning of the poem. This is a vulnerable image - even with the fluorescent nightclothes, the image in my mind is of someone frightened, someone broken. But by the end of the poem,  she shifts 'i want you to find me /crouched in the dark' - and now I begin to imagine someone abilene waiting, abilene biding her time.  

If you would like to buy a copy of Elisabeth's book, you can buy one direct from her publisher Salt here.  You can find more information about Elisabeth at her personal website here. Thank you to Elisabeth for giving permission for her book to be featured here.  For paid subscribers, I'll be adding a post with a writing exercise based on Elisabeth's work so keep your eyes peeled for that email! 

my name is abilene
Elisabeth Sennit Clough

i wear fluorescent nightclothes 
and i want you to find me
crouched in the dark corner 
of a derelict boathouse after a storm
          i believe in the sadness of rivers
sluiced off from their own mouths
at the widest part of their throats
how the ouse crawls towards the ocean
a river on its knees
          i don't forgive the water authority
for the protection it gives small flatlandish towns
there was a time i wished to slip beneath a steady current 
and saucer down to the mud, a dead bivalve
my pearly insides full of slow decay
now all i want is a biblical flood 
to take out those foggy lay-bys
                       and their osseous branches 
                       that scratched at your car windows 
           for all the nectarines of summer
                        to be swept away 
                        with our scummy picnic blanket
           for the earrings necklaces bracelets rings 
                         you should never have bought me 
                         to become a child's treasure 
                         on that other-side-of-the-ocean beach
           for that cottage you live in with her 
                         and the carport you built
                         on its spindly legs 
                         to capsize and drift away like a ghost ship
                         marital and bloated with rot 
my name is abilene 
and i wear fluorescent nightclothes 
i want you to find me 
crouched in the dark