Poetry book of the month: Monica's Overcoat of Flesh by Geraldine Clarkson

Monica’s Overcoat of Flesh contains the most entertaining poems you’ll ever read about being a nun in Peru. It may not be a crowded field, but I’m declaring Geraldine Clarkson the genre’s new laureate.

The poet spent several years in a silent monastic order where creative writing was forbidden, and where, as she has explained in an interview, “basic realities like water and food (and snakes and scorpions!) were a daily preoccupation”. One prose poem from this debut collection gives a verdict on that time in her life: “It was good enough and I had a fierce leper-licking patron I was happy to sail a decade by.”

What sort of poetry might come out of such an ascetic existence? You might expect something understated and sombre, but you shouldn’t. Remember those ecclesiastical poets who gave us the most joyfully experimental writing – think of Herbert’s jewel-like patterns; Donne’s rhetorical fireworks; the gloriously over-the-top kitsch of Hopkins’ sprung rhythm, stuffed with alliteration and internal rhymes.

Hopkins is the guiding influence here. Just read the opening of “For Our Extinguished Guests” aloud: “So Mother Abbess delays a few days in the selva,/ adventures alongside the laity/ in toucan-touched rainforests, tickled/ by tigerlight striping her habit.” Another poem ends “flat on the floor. Fat/ on fear. Flayed/ with sharp, and hot, and not.”

It’s tempting to see this unruly delight in sound as a reaction against religious order: the freedom to make a racket, after years of silence. But Clarkson makes word-drunk sensuousness a vehicle for religious tradition, not a rejection of it.

In “St Rose of Lima’s Revenge”, the rebellious young saint-in-waiting sneaks off to a “bosky place, cloaked in verde” to encounter the divine. (“Bosky” plays on both the word’s meanings; “covered with trees” and “tipsy”). “At a rose-backed hour, wound round with olive/ light, the pink-cheeked would-be anchorite” heads off “To cultivate that sweet edge/ of encounter, and grow – oleander-like – glossy with blessing.”

A tribute to St Francis is similarly intoxicated with the fruits of nature: “Preach cherimoya and budgerigar, flaked gold harvest. Preach honey skin and peacock feather,/ vermilion”. A winningly silly riff on Baudelaire’s prose-poem “Be Drunk” urges the reader to “be a monk”, to “drink abnegation to the dregs” and “wallow to the ear-lobes in abstinence”.

It’s not just (to borrow another poem’s title) “Nuns Galore”. There are several secular flights of fancy; poems about the Queen of Sheba and Miss Marple, a fairytale queen and a boy with the world’s largest tongue, which call to mind Carol Ann Duffy’s comic character-studies, though these aren’t Clarkson’s most mature work.

Of the one-off whimsical conceit poems, the best by a long way is titled “a young woman undressed me and”: the (male) speaker is undressed every five minutes – but, crucially, never re-dressed – for months, endlessly, caught in an unfolding moment.

Most first collections contain a few missteps or failed experiments in voice, and this is no exception. In “Flotsam”, a poem inspired by the 2011 Fukushima disaster, composite words float in the middle of the page, “tsunamiflotsami” and “crumpledcrumbledrocked” standing alone as one-word stanzas. It feels badly misjudged. Elsewhere, the odd line is too effortful in its oddity, becoming merely cartoonish; in a poem about her Irish family, “mad cousins” are unconvincingly pictured “breaking culture with karate chops”.

The most interesting stuff happens when Clarkson’s natural exuberance collides with more personal subject-matter. The title poem – an elegy for a dead daughter – can’t resist punning on “moniker”, but abruptly drops the wordplay in its closing lines, as the poet directly addresses the absent daughter in the plain language once used to call her home: “Monica. For the last time, will you/ come when I call you. Bold child.”

Monica’s Overcoat of Flesh is not a one-size-fits-all book: some readers might be completely turned off by all this. If you want something more classically polished and conventionally lyrical, try Oxford don Peter McDonald’s poignant new collection The Gifts of Fortune instead. But if you’re looking for something raucous and fresh, Clarkson is it.

One poem opens with her voice already at full-throttle: “Daily, daily scathing roughens the psyche/ and veils are unhinged. I too was a planet,/ planed and waterless. Wolf-roved. Our roofs leaked,/ mischievous sisters locked the Mother General/ out in the garth”. This is strangeness underpinned by utter conviction, granting equal weight to the cloistered outer life and “unhinged” inner world. What’s under that quiet sister’s veil? A whole planet, roved by wolves.

Monica’s Overcoat of Flesh is published by Nine Arches at £9.99