"What a joy to read your review of my book," she wrote to me in March 2017, continuing with these words: "Reading is one of my greatest pleasures. The best thing about writing is to be able to give that pleasure to other readers. Nothing can make me happier than to hear from someone who likes reading my poems. It is especially great to have praise from you, a poet too and one whose opinion I value highly. Thank you so much!"
Both her joy in writing and giving pleasure to others by means of her poems, as well as her innate gratitude to life, her simple grace and good manners, radiate out of those few sentences. Accompanied by no fanfare other than that of natural laughter, she was a woman of complete integrity.
I had written an unsolicited review on her self-published book, Portrait in Thread, which she had given to me as a gift in October the previous year.
After having had two titles brought out by Modjaji, At Least the Duck Survived (2011) and The Last To Leave (2014), she self-published, to my knowledge, four more collections, namely, Portrait in Thread (2016), A Pious Pachyderm, Living Locked Down and This is Music (2023). She also wrote plays and short stories, some of which I helped her edit at one time.
I first met Margaret through Paul Mason, whose informal creative writing sessions on the Cape Peninsula she joined in the 1990s. He recalls her as follows:
"A beautiful being who enjoyed a long innings. I have wonderful memories of many nights sitting with her and the others at The Harbour Cafe, writing and reading and eating and quaffing. Of course, Finuala [Dowling] picked up the baton from me, which brought Margaret to living her truest creative voice."
Margaret freely admitted that the informal sessions with Paul had been her foundation and springboard, but the guidance she received from Finuala was exactly what her wonderful wit then required.
For this occasion, I'd like to gift readers with my review and re-affirm my praise of Margaret as person and poet. We are blessed to have met you!
A
Kaleidoscope of Poems
first published in Give Your Writing The Edge Newsletter No.20, February 2017
This
is Clough’s third publication after At
Least the Duck Survived (ISBN 978-1-920397-85-2) and The Last to Leave (ISBN 978-1-920590-55-0), both published by
Modjadji Books. Her unpretentious, spontaneous style, sense of humour and
uncomplicated love for her world that characterised the first books shine
perhaps with even more sureness here. Take, for instance, the opening poem:
Another week
Monday
morning …
This
week I really must visit
my
old friend, Elizabeth.
And
I must also:
tidy
my wardrobe,
write
a poem,
clean
the windows,
oil
all the hinges that are being attacked by rust
and
do my income-tax return.
I
could start today,
but
there’s no hurry
I’ve
got all week.
Sunday
night …
“It’s
been a busy week,”
I
tell my friend Elizabeth,
“I
didn’t have time even
to
finish the poem I was writing
or
sort out the clothes in my cupboard
or
clean the windows.
I’ll
come and see you next week
as
soon as I’ve
oiled
all the hinges that are being attacked by rust
and
done my income tax return.”
The
insight here into not just the speaking self, but into a universal human
weakness; the delicate balance of the enumerated tasks on either side of the
week into two elegantly simple stanzas; the poignancy of the title in relation
to the elisions of each stanza’s first line, to show with crystalline precision
the passage of time – these are marks of a fine poet in control of both craft
and content. And while she does all this, you, the reader, are given the gift
of laughter!
Clough’s mastery of her craft is not limited to the ‘spontaneously speaking’ voice. Words can serve as more formal play-things, too, as this deftly-built rhyming poem shows:
Of Poems and Memory
There
is a kaleidoscope inside my head
that scatters and makes patterns from the jumble
of memories and songs and things I’ve read.
Set off, perhaps, by something someone said
words twist and turn and start to tumble
in the kaleidoscope inside my head.
And later on, at night when I’m in bed
I ponder on these random words and fumble
through memories and songs and things I’ve read.
I take these fragments up and they are fed
with some successes, many bungles
into the kaleidoscope inside my head.
It’s an uncertain path on which I’m led
and on this path I trip and stumble
on memories and songs and things I’ve read.
But sometimes I am able to embed
a poem of my own, however humble
with all the poems, and songs and things I’ve read
in the kaleidoscope inside my head.
“a poem of my own, however humble” is possibly the trademark of Clough’s attitude towards herself and her poetry – one of the characteristics of her writing is a complete absence of conventional insecurity, the kind that so often leads to egoic verbosity and unnecessary contrivances. Clough is a poet who can afford to be humble – she has nothing to prove and everything to give.
Readers will find Clough’s poems are at times in conversation with a wider canon of poetry, which is either frankly acknowledged, as in After Falling off my Chair at a Tea Party (with apologies to Maya Angelou), or more tangential, as in the heartstringing title poem, Portrait in Thread, which brings Ingrid de Kok’s Mending to mind, especially the final stanza:
The
woman plies her ancient art.
Her
needle sutures as it darts,
scoring,
scripting, scarring, stitching,
the
invisible mending of the heart.
Below
is Portrait in Thread, the more
poignant if you are aware of the human detail that the speaker is the
grandmother looking on her granddaughter’s sewing:
Portrait in Thread
I look across my room to where
a new embroidery picture hangs,
a picture of a girl, dark-skinned, red-lipped
head held in tattooed hands.
Coloured threads
laid down like painted brush-marks
show her sorrow.
Stitched into the cloth I see
exquisitely compressed
the compass of her pain.
And I see
another girl, blond head
bent over woden frame. She holds
in delicate fingers a sharp shiny needle
and stabs into a canvas cloth
over and over again.
Taken
as a distant echo to de Kok’s poem, Portrait
in Thread seems to develop the theme of the “invisible mending of the
heart” by facing the pain in female hearts head-on: the sibilance of the lines
“show her sorrow” and “I see/ exquisitely compressed/ the compass of her pain”
culminates in “a sharp shiny needle” that “stabs” – the word choice is suddenly
from a male world, or should I say an ‘outside’ world – a world of violence and
of gangsters; and now my ear picks up – are they gunshots? a belt buckle
hitting floor or bed frame? – of the repeated ‘c’ in “Coloured”, “compressed”,
“compass” and “canvas cloth”, and in an instant I hear-feel the ‘v’ sounds in
the last line as sobs that the woman on the cover of this book is carrying as
her burden.
The empathy, which Clough’s word choice reveals, as she connects across the generations and, through her granddaughter, across races and life circumstances, reflects that you are in the company of a Mistress of verbal threads, which she weaves with beautiful precision of feeling both for humanity as well as for language.
Numerous poems in this volume testify to both. And her feeling encompasses the natural world and its creatures.
Clough is a poet with both feet firmly on the ground, and eyes and ears wide-open. Thus, she is open to the magic of the tangible world, as here:
Fire at Muizenberg
As I walked in the
evening by the river,
the fire was
climbing all over the mountain,
flames were
dancing on top of the bushes
and smoke was
rising, covering the peak.
Then the sun,
pushing through thick brown cloud,
turned to blood
and its rays
fell onto the
water.
And the river was on fire.
Scientifc
observer and feeling poet are one here – there are no flights of fancy, the
vision is utterly concrete. However, the choice of verbs and adverbial phrases,
“climbing all over”, “dancing on top”, “pushing through” and “fell onto” create
an action drama no newspaper would dare publish, it is a natural spectacle that
climbs and dances by means of six short lines into a spiritual dimension to the
irreducible mystery in the final line of “And the river was on fire” – where the elements of fire, water, earth and
air, the immediate moment, the poet’s experience, and the timeless human
imagination are one.
While
the tone in many of the poems in this volume is humorous and self-ironic,
Clough is time and again serious, grieved, or reverent and filled with awe. Her
poems range over and constantly re-arrange the kaleidoscope of what it means to
be alive.
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