Mettle & Flesh

The package arrives. I open it. Immediately I love the look of the book, a red and white cover. Mettle & Flesh: A Collection of Poetry by Claire Turton.

Mettle is a favorite word: a person’s ability to meet a challenge in a spirited and resilient manner. Poetry is a favorite way of reading words, so I am excited to open the book. The cover, the quality of publication, the title and the copy written on the back cover:

Mettle & Flesh

Is a collection of poetry

Encompassing observations on life,

And how we see ourselves within it.

Builds my anticipation.

 Rather than starting at the very beginning, I put my mettle to the pedal and delve randomly. I’m interested to see whether any page/every page can deliver some lines that will move me:

Delve 1

Dark Thoughts

Here in the dark

In the dark it’s calm

Here I lie

I look at my palm

At my palm where the lines

They lie in wait

They lie in hope

Someone will read my fate…

I am reading a poem in the palm of my hand and the poem tells me of the palm pattern lines and the thought patterns that line our brains when we lie alone in the dark of night.

The poem evokes, prompts thoughts, provokes… and this is what I want poetry to do for me. Not just tell a story but give an insight and evoke a memory or emotion.

In John Carey’s A Little History of Poetry he asks:

What is poetry?

If music is sound organized in a particular way,

Poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special,

So that it will be remembered

And valued.

Indeed, Claire Turton’s lines on my first delve are ‘language made special’.

I continue to delve Farewell My Rock gives me:

Sedimentary

Is the only way to describe us

Sedentary

But the layers of time combine us

It is a beautiful, thoughtful, clever piece about the geology of a relationship ending with:

Soil

As all things return to the dirt

Toil

Over it, grow anew from the hurt.

A further delve reveals insights into work-place behavior and, through this, human behavior:

From Our Own Worst

Congratulations, yes, you’ve stopped her getting where she should

You’ve ensured that none of us will become what we could

I then become Julie Andrews and ‘start at the very beginning’ (a very good place to start). I move from ‘delving’ to sequence. The sections of Mettle & Flesh move from

1. Contemplation to 2. Lamentation and onto 3. Rumination

In Rumination we find the title poem and its words evoke tears:

A crack but a chasm, once

An adult, cannot fathom, how

You pushed my flesh to metal

Just a child, little petal, what

lessons you impart, when

You bruise children’s hearts.

Again, quoting John Carey’s wonderful A Little History of Poetry (Yale University Press 2021), he writes:

How can it be that a poet can take a few words from the vast avalanche of language that hurtles past us every day, arrange them in a certain order, and make a deathless work of art?

I am not sure whether Claire Turton’s Mettle & Flesh will be a ‘deathless work of art’, but I do know that, right now, it is a lifeful work of art that inspires us to contemplate, lament and ruminate. Every page has a line, a stanza, that invites us to think, feel and find our own mettle. Furthermore, it has us muse and be amused. It has us find our way through the maze of words and be amazed as we go.

In her preface Claire says that:

Writing helps to strip the need to pretend away and in a way is possibly the most honest form of communication I have found. I encourage everyone to do it.

Well, I will add, that I encourage everyone to get their copy of Mettle & Flesh and delve. Then, follow Claire’s encouragement and take pen in hand, form words that flow, lines that (sometime) rhyme and share your mettle with your World.

I recommend Mettle & Flesh and I thank Claire Turton for her mettle, for her words and inspiration.

Glenn Capelli

Sir Winston Churchill Fellow

Author of Thinking Caps and The Thinking Learning Classroom