Clare

In this fictional portrait, the English naturalist and poet John Clare is remembered by the women in his life: his sister, his wife, his patroness Lady Kettering and his daughter. With a postmodernist disregard for conventional narrative, MacKenna ( The Fallen and Other Stories ) allows the reader to piece the story together from differing viewpoints. The most effective narrator is the condescending Lady Kettering, and in the drama played out between her and Clare, the reader finds the clearest picture of a proud, poverty-stricken poet. Lady Kettering first presumes to revise Clare's poems, ``putting a great deal of effort into her reconstruction of his work,'' and then attempts to seduce him. Clare refuses her and, despite his desperate need for her patronage, resists letting her alter his poetry to suit her political tastes. Other voices are less convincing: his sister, while showing the origins of Clare's love for nature, dwells too much on such nostalgic pleasures as apple-picking at the expense of exploring the relationship between madness and genius, desperation and creativity. The language--delicate, sensuous and lyrical (``it were dark as the heart of a blackberry, not a moon from one end of the night to the other'')--beautifully captures the rhythm and nuances of Northhamptonshire speech. (June)