Clare Shaw’s poems make the house unreliable.
In “The Epistemology of the Staircase”, stairs are supposed to mean movement, change, progress. Clare lets that symbol rot, because the staircase remembers too much. It creaks though it is stone. It holds the mother’s feet, the heavy rain of training, the glass floor nobody falls through, the body that has “never fallen downstairs” but “been pushed”. Suddenly progress is not ascent. It is a story other people tell while the danger keeps whispering. What I love most about this poem is how eerie and uncanny it is!
Then in the second poem the witches arrive.
What I love here is how quickly Clare turns childhood fear into historical weather. Pendle is not decoration. The trials, the dream, the green face at the window. A child’s nightmare becomes a way of understanding what happens when people, madness, fear and authority meet. The final line - “dream that you saved me” - is devastating, of course, because it knows rescue is often only available in sleep.
Nuala Watt’s poems bring the section down to the level of bills, rent, shoes, teapots, impossible shops.
“Elegy for Tchai Ovna, Glasgow” is an elegy for a teahouse, but really it is about the civic places we lose before we understand they were holding us together. The meeting house, the library, the gaps. A pregnancy spoken aloud in a room that later disappears. A child dancing round the remnants. Late openings becoming scarce. The slow conversion of beloved spaces into flats, absence, memory.
“Budget” is almost unbearably calm. School shoes. PAYMENT DECLINED. Rent ascending. The chancellor’s statement trending somewhere above the shortfall. Nuala makes the national intimate without grandstanding. The economy is not an idea here. It is the message on the screen. It is the child’s feet. It is the future reduced to “never mind”.
Together, Clare and Nuala show two different kinds of collapse: the haunted architecture of family and history, and the public places, payments and small securities disappearing under ordinary life. The system does not always announce itself as violence. Sometimes it is a staircase you cannot climb. Sometimes it is a shop that becomes impossible. Sometimes it is a declined payment where the future should be.
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