Conyer Clayton's We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite

Reviewed by Carla Scarano D'Antonio

(Guernica, 2020)

A primordial landscape is delineated in Conyer Clayton’s debut collection, in which the poet bravely traces her uncertain journey. The experience is difficult and aims towards an undefined entity or circumstance that she deems hollow. It is a rewarding process in some ways, a wandering proceeding that eventually allows the poet an awareness of sorts. There are no final solutions or answers, and maybe they are not searched for. The course that is taken is worth it, and the process defines the lyric voice without asking for more or planning resolutions.
 
A bare landscape of rocks and ice melting in the bright sunlight symbolises a mythical past that has almost been erased by the uncertain present but is still there physically:

These nights are white, moulding
minds empty as the air is full.

We’re desperate for what’s buried,
head in a pile of rocks.

What colour is the sun?
Still yellow you suppose.

A gas pipeline
marked on wet concrete.

Mud is slicker than ice these days.
There’s no dry ground to wipe your boots on.

(‘Mud Relish’)

​It is a hard world that dissolves in air, yearning for something different, something outside bare reality, significant and undefined:

She would let them
eat her skin away, gladly
 
accept a brand new breeze, winds
hushed by the rocks’ sediment, a sentiment
we’ve all failed to label, and yet
 
the only property that matters: our thoughts
 
bound in the open air.
 
(‘Tending Towards the Fall’)

​The breeze, winds and open air allude symbolically to freer, boundless spaces that are up in the sky but are nevertheless bound to the earth and to the body:

Same earth of my body.
Same earth of her body.
Same earth of her ashes
poured
into lakewater.
Same earth
on my feet.
…
… Her body
sinking. Her body
sinking
her body joining her body
rising
into the air her body
dispersing my memories dispersing her body
 
(‘Home’)

It is as if the body weighs the poet down, binding her imagination to a delusional reality that prevents her from soaring high. Similarly to Baudelaire’s albatross, whose giant wings prevent it from walking on earth, Clayton feels uncomfortable in this world. It seems as if the poet has a doomed life with no escape except through her struggle to trace a provisional meaning in her poetry by exploring it through the body or, even better, through the skin. The theme of skin in its multiple meanings is recurrent in this collection. The epidermis covers the body and protects the inner organs and the bones, though superficially. Skin also refers to sex and to rolling cigarettes, that is, to the experience of addiction. And the shades of the skin’s complexion culturally and racially define us in our society. The skin is the part that snakes cast away when it is too tight or too old and needs to be renewed. Snakes are depicted on the cover of the collection and are present in two poems. In ‘Over from the Start,’ there is a description of ‘serpents/etched on fossils, a fist/into drywall’ that are archetypes of lost gods. And in ‘How We Burn,’ we have the image of ‘A ladder of snake-skin. The dark difference’; the snake is a symbol of both darkness and renewal, maybe renewal through darkness. In ‘Reach into the Hollows,’ darkness dives into hollowness:

When I was a child I plunged
my arm into the exposed
roots of creek-bed trees.
I shoved my small
 
hand deep, knowing
the scales that slinked beyond
my reach, that embedded
themselves deeper
        into their leavings.
 
There’s a rhythm
to it. An ice-age old
cycle. A fishing line caught
in the bedrock. Our gills still
functioning freely.
 
We find it in
our leavings when
 
we shed our skin
like dynamite. Smote
and sparkling. Relishing
in the drift of smoke upwards.
 
(‘Reach into the Hollows’)

This seems to be how the poet chooses to explore and understand reality, and through this she finds a way to increase her self-awareness. This involves coming out of the hollow, the void that is ‘empty and dry,’ a condition that happens by chance but that is also necessary. It is a way of leaving and going back home at the same time, a wandering attitude that is the poet’s never-ending and always-open aim. The final vision is both corporeal and ethereal:

            We want to be wind-
weathered, but soft to touch; a mountain
            pulled apart by shifting plates, slowly
becoming a river again.
 
(‘Recurrent’)

Earth, water and air merge in the poet’s view in a provisional synthesis that is boundless in the wind-weathered sky and contingent in the realistic landscape. Clayton is capable of memorable lines that condense the sense of the poem into a few words, such as ‘A lifetime spent in yearning’ (‘Unpopular knowledge’), ‘to be crushed and shredded/between foreign skinned fingers’ (‘Broken Leaf’), ‘We have our skin on rock’ (‘Trace’), ‘I sink into your absence’ (‘Goodwill Mug’), and ‘How efficiently we grieve’ (‘The Screen Comes Off Easily’). These are brilliant verses that fulfil the essence of her poetry, conveying completeness in her poetic language but leaving a finitude that is left intentionally open in the content and themes of the poems.
 
A sense of loss that comes from an evoked death is present as a prayer ‘to catch on fire/to get caught up/in a mercifully/lightening storm’ in the first poem, ‘Seeds,’ and in the pressing repetitions and dramatic use of enjambments in ‘Home.’ It seems to be the end of every possible hope, the bottom of utter desperation, with a cry for help in the final line: ‘please mommy, take me home.’ Nevertheless, the poem ‘Recurrent’ offers a more positive vision:

We hold tight to the backs of butterflies
to be carried somewhere fertile
and stable, where our needs will be fulfilled.
               We welcome the dark
 
thriving worms.

​In the final notes, Clayton thanks the reader ‘for taking the time and energy to delve into my little poetic universe,’ an interesting and humble remark that acknowledges the involvement of the reader in her expanding world. Her universe starts from harrowing experiences and proceeds in insightful explorations of the hollow, dark sides of being human in a continuous journey that attempts a poetical synthesis of the ethereal and the corporeal.

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Carla Scarano D’Antonio lives in Surrey with her family. She obtained her Degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing with Merit at Lancaster University in October 2012. She self-published a poetry pamphlet, A Winding Road, in 2011. She has published her work in various anthologies and magazines, and is currently working on a PhD on Margaret Atwood’s work at the University of Reading. In 2016, she and Keith Lander won first prize in the Dryden Translation Competition with translations of Eugenio Montale’s poems. She writes in English as a second language.
 
Visit her websites:
http://carlascarano.blogspot.com/
http://www.carlascaranod.co.uk/