This changes things

By Claire Askew

This changes things is Claire Askew’s first full collection, coming after years of work in Scotland’s flourishing poetry and spoken word scene. Her poems focus on the lives and experiences of women - particularly the socially or economically marginalised - at pains both to empathise and to recognise the limits of this empathy. They embody a need to acknowledge and challenge the poet’s privileged position as documenter and outsider, a responsibility to the poem’s political message and to that message’s human subject. This changes things draws much of its strength from this exploration of inbetweenness. Claire Askew’s purposeful deployment of objects, lighting effects and liminal spaces implicates her reader in the poem’s argument, holds up a mirror and asks us to pay attention. The book’s romantic relationships, depictions of frustrated travel or social mobility, are bound up in its awareness of the systems of power that permit no true state of innocence. Even the final poem, ‘Hydra’ - with its celebration of the body and its senses - cannot ultimately allow us off the hook. This changes things unsettles the homely and recognisable. In its compromised, imperfect characters and narratives, it proposes a radical way of translating neoliberal Britain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jan 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781780372778

Claire Askew

Claire Askew's debut novel All The Hidden Truths won the 2016 Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize as a work in progress, and the 2019 McIlvanney Debut Crime Fiction Award. Two of her novels have been shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. Her fourth novel, A Matter of Time, was longlisted for the McIlvanney Crime Novel of the Year 2022. Claire is also a poet and non-fiction writer and she lives in Carlisle.

Book preview

Dukkha

Shelter is the only really necessary thing.

Every creature has its burrow,

bolt hole, cave, its fist of twigs.

Just make it safe, a place

above the flood plain: shake

its sticks and slates to test

it can withstand a storm. That’s all.

That, and water somewhere near,

the good, clear kind that scrubs itself

clean through the stones and flows

all year without a freeze. Some fish.

Some trees. A nesting bird for eggs.

Some plants, a patch of dirt,

some basic tools. A shovel and a pan.

But then, your square of soil might spoil

its seeds. You’ll need blades, some kind

of beast to slug them through the mud

in rows. You’ll need to feed it

from your grain: this changes things.

You’ll need some cloth.

You’ll need to cut a bigger plot.

Now there must be hands to help:

more hands, more mouths.

The shelter shrinks, the feed bags thin,

you need a needle, thread, a pot,

a kiln, a cart. There must be

markets, good roads leading in.

You’ll need a lamp. You’ll need a gun.

You’ll need a coin. You’ll need

a tin to keep your coins inside.

You’ll need a man to guard the tin.

Give him your gun and get another.

Make your shelter taller, stronger.

Now you have an acre, need

an engine, need an engine shed.

Now fuel: a sticky, black-eyed well.

A slaughterhouse, a pit for rotting things,

incinerator, chimneys made of brick,

cement. Good rivets, chicken wire –

no, barbed. A guard. Electric current,

cashflow. Long flat cabins

for your hired hands. A bank.

The shelter must be strong,

the water pure. The soil must nurture

tall, true wheat, the hands work

till the yield is in. The lamp must strike,

the gun must kill its target cleanly.

This is all you want.

This is all that anyone wants.

I

I’m sorry I’m still in love with my grandmother

I’m sorry I’m still in love with my grandmother.

Creature in curlers, who never scoured

the pans to your liking; who collected

the milk off the step in her slip

and stockings at seventy; who’d take off

her shoe – stiletto or slipper – to skelp

an unruly dog. I’m sorry I’m still in love.

With my grandmother, everything was done

to extremes. The Christmas puddings, flooded

with brandy; the flames she kindled,

a kimono’d Moloch. Cigarettes, their spent ends

strewn from sink to sofa; the stove with its soup,

and the grate with a fresh glow at 5 a.m. –

the house always hot as hell. I’m sorry,

I’m still in love with my grandmother,

having been plied with shortbread

and sausage-meat sandwiches, too small

to know better. I was seduced

by the photo-albums, the jewellery box –

by the sweet-shop, the swing-park,

the shopping centre. She had so many strategies.

I’m sorry I’m still. In love with my grandmother

is

Reviews for This changes things

[maowangvater · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I picked up this varied and vigorous collection of poems by an Edinburgh poet because it was recommended by the staff of Golden Hare Books, an independent bookseller in the same city. I started reading it immediately, continued it on the trans-Atlantic flight back to Houston from Scotland, and finished it when I returned home. It’s a delight. Askew’s subjects, emotional response, and points of view are wide ranging: a house fire, Barcelona seen by the tourist and the resident poor, what it’s like to be a poltergeist, the disconsolate loneliness of small town life where everything remains the same, travel on the American west coast, her love for her grandmother and a collection of grandmother’s sayings, “What a right bag of washing / Bent as a nine-bob note / Twined as a bag of weasels,” even one I heard from my American born Scotch grandmother, “Six of one and a half dozen of another.”