Sunday Review: Jenny Cleland - In and Out of Love Poems

In order to write a love poem, one must have experienced love, naturally; but one also must love language. A love poem is not just an evocation of desire, kinship or sensuality, it is also a celebration of how we use words to bring expression and witness to that love.

And so, we find within In And Out Of Love Poems, Cleland’s debut full-length collection, writing that is rich not only with the carousal of love, but also in how that love is expressed. A stroke of the face becomes “gentle journeys over the bones”.  A glimpse of a stranger, mistaken for someone once close, is morphed into “[y]our name reverberated / through that cavernous heart”. The idea of alcoholic spirits that do not mix becomes “Your tongue and your heart / still burn with the taste / of me”. We find passion, but not raw, frenzied passion; rather, it has been filtered through considered articulation, leaving it more accessible, more provocative of empathy to the reader.

In searching for love, and exploring the fulfilment one requires in love, it is interesting to note what Cleland rejects. in ‘Star Storm’ we see the realisation of an unrequited love: “I wished / for happiness, just happiness, // not you, not so specific as you”. The poetry revels in the clash of the grandiose, abstract idea of love against the concrete reality of the beloved, the other person who sometimes pales in comparison to the concept of love. In ‘Face It’, we find the bold proclamation “You fall in love with places, not faces”, suggesting that love – true, significant love – develops from what you live through together, beyond initial physicality. And if you experience a place with someone who isn’t equal to your passion, both the place and the person becomes vapid and insipid.

I am bored of empty places,

grey places, tired of trying

to understand what you are

and are not. I am red hot.

Cleland clearly knows that the road to love is not always a smooth path, and the triumph of the collection is this fresh contrast of pure love poems alongside more cautious or regretful tales. ‘The Window and the Bird’ uses the metaphor of a fledgling smacking into a kitchen window mid-flight, shaken up but still able to fly away after. The idea of perfecting flight is manipulated and repurposed: “There was no learning curve / … I was out of my tree, / crashing again toward / the illusion of love.” Elsewhere, we get the twin images of the packed suitcase and an open door that one can’t bring oneself to walk through in a poem (‘Clashing Symbols’) that is unabashedly meta in its use of symbolism, its brazenness enforcing the brutality of the message.

Scattered through, Cleland gives us a few micro-poems, each one highly effective in their brevity and succinctness. Some serves as notes to oneself, a pep talk in self-love; others are striking damnations towards those who have come before and betrayed love. A key theme throughout the collection is this need, after unsuccessful romances and dangerous, false roads, for self-love. There is a beautiful simplicity in ‘Falling Snow’ when the speaker states:

My life has been beautiful since you left.

My heart has been repainted.

It is a new blank canvas

The economy of language serves to echo the new-found freedom: suddenly life is clearly, simpler than before. In other poems, we find Cleland questioning herself and others, but here, when she states, “I know who I am now”, it feels like a glorious revelation, one that the reader can’t help but cheer for. The story comes full circle in ‘Conquering Fear’, a keystone poem in the collection, that marks a moment in falling back in love, after a catalogue of hurt. Although not the last poem in the book, it fulfils the book’s story, and leaves one feeling oddly fulfilled and yet desirous within their own love:

I have become an open door

that had not been walked through before

and I wanted more and more and more

of you.

In total, this is a carefully considered series of poems that work incredibly well together. There is perhaps a bit more emphasis on the ‘out of love’ that the ‘in love’, but victory without adversity rings hollow, and Cleland gives us an account that shows both defeat and resurrection in poems that any reader will easily identify with. 

In and Out of Love Poems: Passionate Verses of Desire and Heartbreak: Exploring Romantic and Sexual Love is available to order via Amazon.