Review of A Pair of Three, by Claire Crowther, pub. Shearsman Books 2022

     I wonder about the singularity
    of a pair of three –
    an us.

Claire Crowther has in the past sometimes been seen as, if not exactly a “difficult” or “obscure” poet, at least a determinedly cerebral one, not afraid to use vocabularies that don’t often feature in poetry (like that of physics in her collection Solar Cruise) and always demanding thought and concentration (amply repaid) from her reader. As we shall see, her technical and verbal skills are just as much in evidence here, but this collection’s focus is one that is perhaps more immediately accessible; the experience of being married to a person previously widowed. A marriage in which, pace the late Diana, there genuinely are three people:

     It’s late. No, partner, not too late. Still
    one of us is late: (A Pair of Three)

The pun on “late” is classic Crowther, as is the happy coinage “werhusband” in another poem. In “Case Endings” she uses the lexis of grammar to ponder this complicated relationship:

   Could he/I/she be subjunctive?
   wouldwife couldwife

   Do ‘we’ have the present and/or the past?
   triplecouple oncecouple doublecouple

   Is every ending right?
   wo/man wer/once

   Can ‘I’ be objective about ‘them’…?
   foundwife lostwife

 Is this ending right for ‘us’…?
 wefinders wekeepers

And in “The Physics of Coincidence” she uses line breaks to jolt the reader into thinking:

 If two atoms

 share an electron and bond in one body
 in one compass-
 ion of matter swaying with so much co-
 incidence direct-

 ionless as the atoms

But alongside this intellectual (though far from dispassionate) wordplay goes a far more direct and emotional response, for instance, in “Over”, to the sheer implausibility of death, the difficulty in believing that it can have impinged on ordinary life:

  How could she lie so quiet
 when she had mending to do?

 How could he search for a vase
 while she made him a widower?

And her technical ability never shows so clearly as when she expresses the feeling of another’s presence in that simplest-looking and most vernacular of all forms, the ballad. No form looks so easy to write; none is so easy to write badly. In “The Visitor”,

   While he was out I read a book.
  I had to rest that day.
  Then I heard a key in the lock
  and steps in the hallway

the tension begins with the pinpoint rhythms of those third and fourth lines and ratchets up throughout.

If this review begins to resemble a series of quotes, that is because it is very hard to express an idea in more telling words than those Crowther uses.

  Must we all leave
  down the line lyrical lying where we will? (Illyria by Rail).

“And what should I do in Illyria”, indeed… This is one of those collections that, because of the universality of its subject matter, speaks immediately to the reader. But at the same time, said reader recognises the presence of a powerful intellect and a depth of meaning that does not yield itself at a first reading.