Outside Looking In

Clare Smith

• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781398442290
• eBook ISBN: 9781398442313
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

"A characteristic of autism can be a difficulty using speech to express thoughts, feelings, and experiences. However, there is often an eloquence in self-expression using the arts, including poetry. Clare's sensitive and engaging poems provide an insight into her mind and her autism."
Professor Tony Attwood, author of The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome.
What if you were given a life-altering diagnosis at 57? One that meant you aren't who you thought you were? But one that explained everything?
These poems vibrate with intensity and curiosity about life, and because she came to this knowledge so late in life, many of Clare Smith's poems focus not so much on what it means to be autistic, but on what it means to be human.
Throughout her life, as she struggled to fit into a world that to her was utterly strange, she poured her hopes, her joys and at times her despair into words.
She trained as a journalist, taught to cut out all emotion from her reporting, but her private writing is different – she created poetry that spoke to her deepest needs. There, exposed in her writing, is her yearning to belong, her astonishment at the physical world, her knowledge – decades before the doctors confirmed it – that she is different.
She's spent a lifetime trying to make sense of her life – a journey that many of us, whether autistic or neurotypical, are on, and one in which we all face the same questions.

Endings

Obituary

Well, that put me in my place, didn’t it? Me and all the others.

Not in the kitchen, of course – that would upset the mothers.

No, just a four-word dismissal in half a page.

The rank he held on the global stage,

This man astride his industry. They praised

His bluntness, even his ‘brutality’, phased

With his ‘fatherly feeling for his staff’,

He protected all, even the chaff,

‘Especially if they were sent in harm’s way’.

This, the writer did not downplay.

Well, I’d turned him down gently to spare his feeling.

My ingenue to his older wolf, but I wasn’t kneeling.

Then I was ‘let go’, made no connection.

But now, forty years on and from affection,

My husband says to my astonishment

That of course there was. It was my punishment.

So this obituary recites his work in terms curled

Round one of their own: a man’s man in a man’s world.

For form’s sake, they mention his wife, his second and third,

But what really happened down the years isn’t even blurred.

For all of us, the rest of us, they use the Weinstein knife:

Dismissed in just four words: “A complex private life”.

A Cooler Breeze

A cooler breeze from a cloudy sky

Whispers around my face, a face that gazes

Away and alone.

Gusts carry lifeless leaves along

And down to the silent ground.

And down to the stony ground.

The window frames my face,

Marking my cheek where I lean so heavily,

And the wind cuts colder when it finds

The tears that cling and slip and die.

The tears that cling and cry.

The air swirls round and through the trees

That stir and sigh to its calling,

And I in my windowless time here echo

The trees and fade with the lonely wind.

And fade with the lonely wind.

(September 1979)

Outcast

Cast out a mistake, a m...

Table of contents

• Alien
• Disconnection
• Fear & anger
• Endings
• Awe
• Connection