POEM OF THE WEEK

Born in 1992, Jenna Clake grew up in Burntwood, Staffordshire, “where the two most interesting aspects of the town are that it has a vinegar factory and it has Britain’s smallest park”, as she told one interviewer – a description that turns the mundane into something faintly surreal, much as

Clake does in her poems.

Her style – a surface of prosy, deadpan absurdism, with darker currents underneath – owes something to the late American poet James Tate, filtered through the younger British writers Caroline Bird and Luke Kennard, whose work Clake grouped together (in her PhD thesis) as the “New Absurd”.

I was hesitant to write an introduction to this poem. Part of what makes it so effective is the surprise it offers on a first reading, the way the reader’s smile at what first seems a whimsical conceit – two girls dressed as clowns! – gives way to a sinking feeling as it becomes clear what is really being addressed. It begins like a joke, but, as Clake asks in another poem, “what if a joke isn’t a joke but a slow destruction”?

This week’s choice is one of several poems from her new second collection Museum of Ice Cream that explore an eating disorder – here symbolised as the “clown suit” that both girls wear as they “keep each other/ on track”, eating less and less, drifting away from other friends. Painfully, what might have been a supportive friendship here becomes a toxic codependency. Tristram Fane Saunders