The Other Woman

I don't like poetry. That's the official line. The vast majority of the time, I find it self-indulgent and boring to read. So why was I reduced to floods of tears by a poem in Kate Clanchy's recent collection 'Newborn'? Poetry, it turns out, is not pointless when it speaks directly to you.

Here is the poem in question.

The Other Woman

I am running to meet her,
now, the girl who lives on her own,
who has in her hand the key to her own
hallway, her own bare polished stair, who
is clacking down it now, in kitten heals, swearing,
who is marching over envelopes marked with a single name,
who is late, can be late, sleep late, forgets things,
who tonight has forgotten hat, gloves and
umbrella, who is running not caring
through luminous rain.
What shall we say?

Shall I slip off
my coat and order cold wine
and watch myself sip it through
the long row of optics, arching my back
on the velvet banquette? And pick up the wit,
the moue of the mouth as we pass jokes like olives?
And say the right thing and stand up for my round,
tapping the bar with a rolled-up twenty,
tipsy, self-conscious, a girl,
a vessel of secrets, so
carefully held in?

Or down just one glass
and see stars and the whole
room go smeary, have nothing to say
and say all the same - You don't understand.
What happens is someone slips from your side, someone
full-sized. Will she yawn, get her bag, start tucking
her fags in when I get out his photo,
say Look, look how he's grown,
all by himself, he has grown
to the size of my life?


Oh god, I just started crying again just copying that out.

This poem is so unbearably cruel. It is written from the point of view of the mother, but I am not a mother, and so that is not how I read it. I am 'The Other Woman' of the title. Running late to meet my married friend, my friend the mother, whose rich internal life is so beautifully chronicled in the rest of Clanchy's book. I don't have a rich internal life. I just have kitten heels and my own front door. I may look luminous but I am an object of pity. In another poem, Clanchy talks of a friend who is single: "I thought / of her last eggs / the womb staying empty, folded / like an evening purse". What is wit and wine against an empty, folded womb? And then the cruelest blow of all: I don't understand. When my friend shows me her baby photos, she is afraid I might yawn. She has moved on to another place, a place of total fulfillment - "he has grown / to the size of my life." My pleasures are as transient and meaningless as olives. In order to maintain our friendship, she must lie to me, "say the right thing", be " a girl, / a vessel of secrets, so / carefully held in." She is afraid that if she shows her true self, her friend will get her bag and leave, but she does not allow for her friend's empathy. You don't understand. Her friend is The Other Woman. Sexy. Selfish. A threat.

"You don't understand" says Clanchy, but I do understand. On the contrary, it is you who does not understand me. I am not bored of your baby. What breaks my heart is to see my friend sitting opposite me thinking that we have nothing in common - "what shall we say?" She thinks she knows me because she used to be me, but it is her own ambivalence about her lost self she sees reflected back at her. She has moved on, but the one thing she can never know is how it feels to be left behind. The mother in the poem, finding her friend wanting, has one drink and goes home to her baby. But the Other Woman, as with all Other Women, is glamorous but lonely. The mother has moved on to something, has grown a person to be her life. But the Other Woman has no life. Or no life that her friend can see.

The Other Woman a brilliant poem describing the divide which appears between single women and their friends with babies. What I would like to know is whether Clanchy believes that the divide is real or illusory. Fortunately I will have the chance to find out, because alongside historian Helen Rappaport, Kate Clanchy will be my guest at the Firestation Bookswap in Windsor this Thursday. Do join us.