We were looking at her poem ‘Bear-Awareness and Self-Defence Classes’ (subtitled ‘Or Fathers and Husbands’). Like many of Siân’s poems it is short and made of words and sentences an eight-year old could read. But while its subject matter is about what happens to some children, it is absolutely not a poem for all children.[...] Like being winded. Like waking up in a sweat. Like the air leaving the room. The point of this poem about domestic violence (as I read it) is the control with which it is executed, through the simple-looking but deadly metaphor of wild bears. Painful subject matter has been rendered truthfully and (apparently) artlessly, with no poetical high flourish and certainly no moralising. The unstated words of comfort implicit in the poem iterate in nothing more than a whisper that by being truthful, by using song to describe our suffering we can overcome what threatens to overcome us.
[...] Reading Cliff’s poems is a bit like watching the best kind of slapstick comedy: each gag is inevitable, hilarious and sad all at once. In Cliff’s poems you see the wooden plank on the shoulder of one man as it spins around, misses his friend as he ducks out of the way then catches him in the face on the return circuit. What Cliff also shows us, and this is what give the poems a special kind of resonance, is the following shot where you can catch the same man scrabbling around on the floor, looking for a contact lens, perhaps, or perhaps just scrabbling around on the floor. Like Siân, Cliff does not moralise or attempt to persuade us what this might mean. – Anthony Wilson
Check out the full review here
