Cunning, Precision... and Weight Loss by David Morley

Claire Crowther spent several years as an editor and journalist in the weight management industry. The subject of her pamphlet-length sequence Incense is body fat, a subject ‘relevant to many readers but rarely written about’ sayeth The Blurb of Truth. Crowther’s chosen poetic form is the ‘aptly named’ fatras. The fatras arose in the fourteenth century France from the body of another form the fatrasie, ‘a type of verse that exploits the unreasonable, the ridiculous and the grotesque’ according to Lambert Porter’s essay La Fatrasie et le Fatras (1960). The subjects of these old poems were surreal five centuries before Surrealism: a cheese sneezes, an onion brays, a basin chants a vigil, a flying castle sews an oven. Such medieval play demanded medieval rigour. In the fatras, two lines, evocative and courtly in tenor, launched the following eleven lines, furnishing the first and last lines and giving the poem its phrasal momentum and framing. Rule one for the fatras was to begin sharply and finish shapely; rule two insisted that reality is dreamlike. Hence this new example of the form from Claire Crowther:

Ask a woman who’s lost four stone

from side to side like a throat cut.

Ask a women who’s lost four stone

of (mostly) fat:

what is the difference?

Capacity to jump and run?

‘Sure. But – as if snow melted

exposing tracks in tarmac

and the weediness of old

grass, this soaked ground –

my age has been uncovered.

Drawn mouth, a neck scored

from side to side like a throat cut.’

‘Untitled’

Crowther’s conflation of fat and fatras could, at first glance, appear whimsical, even too insistently willed. My view is that this entire sequence is a minor revelation - an almost outrageously blessed ravelling of traditional form and contemporary subject. The subject is treated with truth and respect, yet the old form is given fresh tone and turn. Although Crowther follows the form’s strictures to the letter, she is shrewd too, carving her own patterns. ‘Let Us Now Praise Adipose Tissue’ recreates the shape of ‘Two long chains/of fatty acids linked/by a glycerol backbone’. This poem also demonstrates deeper strengths in the language chosen: Crowther uses scientific terminology to cunning poetic purpose, and she also uses that precise language accurately. Like Marianne Moore, she is able to locate the poetry asleep in the language of science, even dare I say in the language of weight management.

Incense, Claire Crowther, Flarestack Poets, 28 pp., £4.50, ISBN 978-1-906480-27-1

Thanks are due to the editor of Poetry Review, Fiona Sampson, where this piece first appeared.