Mistress of verbal threads and natural laughter

Margaret Clough died this week, at the age of 90. This is my tribute to her.

"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

Review by Silke Heiss, 
first published in Give Your Writing The Edge Newsletter No.20, February 2017

Margaret Clough, Portrait in thread and other poems, Margaret Clough: 2016, pp. 43, Cover art from an embroidery by Danielle Clough

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.