Guernica Editions, 2020
You know from the start, when you begin reading Conyer
Clayton’s debut book of poems, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, that this
will be a ‘one-two punch’ kind of collection. It begins with “Seeds,” a poem
that bursts out on the first page with the emphatic confessional declaration “I
pray to catch on fire,/to get caught up/in a mercifully/lightening storm,//burn
my body back/to earth.” Right away, the tone has been set. Here is a voice that
longs for transformation, even if it means destruction first. Here is a phoenix
coming up from the ashes.
Clayton doesn’t flinch or turn away from the most difficult
moments in life. The notion of illusion and reality threads itself throughout
her work. In “Blackout,” she suggests that maybe “if we hang/enough butterflies
on invisible strings/we’ll enjoy it here, be fooled//into a smile by bright
colours/and a song on repeat.” Who hasn’t felt that before, when you realize
that you wish you could just imagine easier things into being? In “Recoil,” she
speaks to how domestic abusers often hide in plain sight. From the outside, a
house and its ‘perfect family’ can seem calm, but on the inside, a person
living inside it can observe the almost-to-be-expected “continual stings,/[of]his
hand on her.” Nothing is as it seems.
What this poet excels at, though, is the way she so
creatively fashions her images and lines. The images are uniquely crafted, so
you get little beauties like “feet blackened like catfish/on the flat tar
roof,” a shawl that’s “stitched with longing,” crickets that “bellow that time
turns/over,” and parasols that spin “around dizzied heads,/beckon you to my
bed.” Her lines dance on the page in thought provoking ways. Her use of
enjambment and white space is innovative, so that you almost get a sense of poetic
waves—and waves of breath, too—as you read through the collection.
There is loss, as well, in this book of poems. In the
heartrending “Full Sunlight,” the death of a mother is paralleled to the
cutting down of a two hundred year old tree. As the tree plummets to the
ground, the woman’s body is removed from the house. The speaker watches: “I
stand engulfed by a hollow stump,/full sunlight streaming through my windows.” Here
is a nod to the power of lineage—to a literal and metaphorical family tree—and
to how it always seems that endings are quickly transformed into new
beginnings, even though they’re often painful.
In “What You Actually Lost,” the speaker tells of the
time they’ve “run cemetery paths casually/and been scolded by a woman/sitting
at her dead husband’s grave.” In “Swallow
the Seeds,” the final stanza encourages the reader to “Feel death,/but in this
way: poured/over firmly potted orchids.” You find yourself, as a close reader
of the poetry, caught up in a gathering of work that asks you to try to feel
more deeply, even if it upends your world. It’s only by being open enough to be
aware of the upending of a person’s world and life—the poems seem to suggest—that
endings of all sorts might have potentially fruitful new beginnings. We have to
experience and feel pain and loss in order to fully value what is light
afterwards.
In We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, Conyer
Clayton proves herself to be a poet with a keen sense of style and presence.
Her voice, her poetry, asks the reader to consider what it means to question
their life experiences. How do we cope with our life’s tragedies? How do we
manage aftermath and tsunami-like trauma, abuse, addiction, loss, and grief?
How do we manage the transformations that make us anew afterwards? The surfaces
of things, and the undersides, too, are all there for us to consider.
Kim Fahner lives and writes
in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the
first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings
(Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the
Writers' Union of Canada, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of
Canada. Kim blogs fairly regularly at kimfahner.wordpress.com and can be
reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com