TRAVELLERS WITHOUT BAGGAGE
Valerie Clarke
A first collection of poetry by Valerie Clarke.
(As Valerie Clarke died of cancer just before this book was published, there is no author page for her.)
Praise for Travellers Without Baggage:
'These myriad travellers, inventors, foot-soldiers, pastors, vagabonds — even those tourists temporarily left luggage-less in Tbilisi—are seldom truly unencumbered, whether by centuries of history and conflict or by the ache for understanding the numinous, the transcendent, through psychology’s subconscious, through fable and ritual, through the garnered possessions and memories of disparate lives. Let Valerie Clarke’s distinctive and persuasive poetic voice lure you into this series of convincing and subtly-crafted odysseys which are both aesthetically rewarding and ultimately unsettling.' Anne-Marie Fyfe
'Where some poets retain, like Bishop, their "infant sight", spinning lyrics from their precise power of observation, Valerie Clarke retains a hunger for stories, able to spin her own from the imaginative pathways that other lives, texts, and artworks suggest to her. She has a romantic, historical imagination, but also the shaping sensibility of the poet, and the two have come together, with intense fascination and empathy, in the lyrics and narratives of this fine collection.' Mimi Khalvati
'Valerie Clarke is a poet who is deeply concerned about the human condition. Often her descriptions of human behaviour carry a sense of displacement and many poems have social and political implications. In Travellers Without Baggage, her ambitious first full collection, she uses both graphic detail and dream visions to uncover disturbing and potent subject matter.' Myra Schneider
'This is a compassionate and often surprising collection in which the borders betwen imagination and reality, past and present, people and place, are constantly breached or removed altogether.' Ambit
About Valerie Clarke
Valerie Clarke died from cancer during the final preparations for the publication of this book. She was unable to complete an introduction herself, but she did leave some notes regarding the content. The format of the book and the poems themselves were completed before Valerie received her final prognosis, though she had doubtless suspected for some time that this book would be her final testament. The poems encapsulate the many aspects of her interesting life and her intense, detailed observation of people and their feelings – especially the oppressed.
As a young woman she played an active part in the ’50s and ’60s revolution in attitudes, against a backdrop of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In fact, she suffered for the rest of her life from what she jokingly called her “Aldermaston Knee”.
During her twenties she lived in Hampstead, which she regarded as her “hub of the universe”. Hampstead at this time was home to aspiring writers, poets, composers, and expatriates of all nationalities, and amongst her friends were immigrants from the Polish, Jewish, African and Caribbean communities. One of her often-quoted reminiscences was being asked to dance by Jomo Kenyatta at Africa Unity House. Her poem Living 1956 reflects attitudes at that time, some of them based on her own experiences.
In the late 1950s she experienced life in Russia, travelling by ship on one of the first student tours. She went again in 1976, on an Intourist package that included Moscow, Leningrad, Baku, Tbilisi, and Yerevan. She saw at first hand how the KGB operated when some members of the tour group were arrested, and the terror of our Russian tour guide when she briefly lost touch with us. The title poem of the collection, Travellers Without Baggage, is named after this event.
During the period 1969-1971 Valerie worked at the University of Chicago Administration Office, living in a poor district on the South Side which was policed by armed local residents, as the ward did not support the Mayor. This was during the time of ‘Students for a Democratic Society’, the Kent State Shootings, and the elimination in Chicago of several leaders of the Black Power Movement as they slept in their beds. A Grand Jury later indicted the Chief of Police on a charge of murder.
Valerie always enjoyed travelling, at various times visiting places as diverse as Israel, Riyadh, Bombay, Varanasi, Kathmandu, Istanbul, Auschwitz, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Singapore, First and Second World War battlefields, and various areas of North America, the Crimea and Iceland. In the 1980s she visited Romania to explore the Dracula legend with her youngest son.
Several of her poems reflect the horrors of war, fear, and repression, including Shoes (which won fourth prize in the 2006 Arvon International Poetry Competition), Sightseeing, Ukraine 1941, Deserts, The Swing, and Our Bodies are the Best Weapons that We Have.
However, it must not be thought that Valerie was preoccupied with these subjects. When asked what motivated her to write she would say that Italo Calvino expressed her feelings exactly. It was “to narrate, to pile stories upon stories without trying to impose a philosophy of life” on anybody. She accepted life and her own death with equanimity, without the need for explanations. In the last few poems she seems aware of her fate, as yet undiagnosed, particularly in Dreamlines written in February 2008.
Valerie had not been a lifelong writer; her first big success was having a poem (under her former name of Valerie Cooper) in the Pen Anthology of New Poems, 1962. One of the editors was Ted Hughes, who didn’t attend the launch party. Sylvia Plath stood in for him. She was very friendly and welcoming, considering that at the time she was writing her last devastating poems.
After a long gap in which she raised three children and didn’t write at all, she returned to London and responded to an advert for a versification course, offered by Mimi Khalvati. This was the perfect reintroduction to poetry, and she once again became hooked.
Valerie wanted special thanks to go to Mimi Khalvati, whose teaching and inspiration started her writing again; to Jane Duran for her time and patience, both in her workshops, and in the close reading of many of Valerie’s poems; to Myra Schneider for her guidance and encouragement; to Maurice Riordan for his sound criticism and humour; and to Anne-Marie Fyfe for all the opportunities that she gave Valerie to read at the Troubadour and Bedford Park, as well as for her inspirational workshops.
Gerry Clarke
London 2008
An extract from Travellers Without Baggage
SHOES
This poem was sparked by a BBC TV series of programmes: ‘The Nazis – a warning from history’.
Then there are suitcase dreams. She unpacks
institutional clothes. The lid bears initials –
her own. The clothes are not hers, survivors
of someone else. Where are the children? Rest
is not permitted in this inexhaustible dream.
And why the uniform, the lace-up shoes?
Clear the bed. Let her sleep. No need for shoes
in this house of absences. She packs, unpacks
unfamiliar objects. The pain of dreams,
being cast off as in a shipwreck, initials
painted on trunk and suitcase, the rest
of what was brought, lost. A survivor
in no real sense of the word. Survivors
share hope. Do her children have shoes?
Who has taken them in? As for the rest –
cousins, parents, husband – she’s unpacked
them. A bonus to own this case, initials
proving it’s hers. It sits inside dream
to be packed for the last time. The dream
dictates what she’ll wear, uniform to survive
the destination she must travel to, initials
on lists of arrivals blessed with strong shoes.
Opening the suitcase again, she packs
penitentiary garments; now rests,
rides on white air, levitates to rest
on the sill of a high window, dreams
frost, the scent of birches. She unpacks
nothing. The case clicks shut. Survival
seems less important. Who needs shoes
when thus uplifted? From above initials
blur. She floats into light. Initial
shock of cold to her face. Her eyes rest
on an efflorescence of snow, paths where shoes
have etched prints. She descends. The dream
spits her out, sleep-walker, survivor
of inconceivable acts. What can be packed
that is life-giving? Initials a mere dream
of identity. Rest, soothes her heart, survivors
are those who have shoes, a case to unpack.
