REVIEW: CATHI RAE’S ‘YOUR CLEANER HATES YOU AND OTHER POEMS’
By Stella Backhouse
For women of a certain age, the Instagram account of Leicester-based poet Cathi Rae is nothing short of iconic. Her life-affirming two-fingers to the play-it-safe-stay-invisible school of older women’s fashion – her punk-fuelled manifesto of ‘stuff what other people think and wear what the f*** you like’ – has revolutionised my approach to dressing in my seventh decade and brought me more joy than I can easily express. So it was with a particular curiosity that I opened Cathi’s début collection Your Cleaner Hates You and other poems. Would it live up to expectations?
Your Cleaner Hates You is eclectic in range, with poems covering subjects as diverse as ageing and retrospection, family history, the writing process and the valued companionship of dogs and horses. Notably strong on list poetry, if a single idea could be said to unite it, I think it would be the idea of constructing other people’s stories through the opening of small – sometimes eccentric – windows into their lives. A bit like Instagram, in fact.
The first three poems, all of them ostensibly about the relationships between domestic cleaners and their employers, set the scene here. Her intimate but mostly unnoticed contact with the domestic sphere gifts to the cleaner some snapshots of family life that might surprise her employers: “7. She knows whose son is drinking cider and/whose son is dealing weed…13. She knows you are £234.57 overdrawn one/day after payday”.
Did I enjoy these poems? Yes I did. But on my first reading (and although I understood Cathi to be making a valid point about how readily we dismiss people), I confess I was mildly irritated by the cleaners’ self-righteous moral superiority, audible in lines like “Your cleaner has flicked through your expensive/moleskin bound journal and quite frankly her/advice would be not to give up the day job, if of/course you had a day job to give up./Your cleaner hates your poetry”.
But then I thought: what if the inclusion of references to poetry isn’t incidental? What if this is actually about poetry? Could the employer be the poet? Could people like me – critics idly squinting at the bits the poet shares (or inadvertently reveals), passing judgement and mouthing off about how we could do better ourselves – be the cleaner? What if this is about the poet’s – the woman’s – fear and insecurity? What if this is a poet standing on the queasy cliff-edge of self-revelation, racked with fear of what readers will think of her? Because those fears are well-founded.
Apart from the opening poems, the ones that most impressed me were ‘I remember Everyone I Have Ever Slept With’ and ‘Feral Boys That I Have Fucked’. Obviously indebted to Tracey Emin’s sadly no-longer-in-existence piece of installation art, it’s possibly significant that both of them are list poems, their structured form perhaps acting as a reassuring mental balance to their explosive content. Make no mistake: these brief, tantalising glimpses into another person’s life do more than probe the question of how much the poet should risk revealing; as poems in which a woman records her sexual history, they actually live it.
Not everyone on Cathi’s first list is someone she has slept with in the sexual sense, but any woman who goes public with lists like this – headed by titles like this – will know there will be readers out there who will not differentiate and who will judge, and that their judgements will not be kind. That I am obliged to call these statement poems ‘brave’ is a measure of the misogyny, hatred and double standards to which women – all women, even women who offer as the sum total of their accumulated lifetime’s wisdom the inoffensive observation that “Dogs are better than hot water bottles/You cannot own enough pairs of reading glasses/And never take a good night’s sleep for granted” – are routinely subjected.
In broad terms, this is a collection about the risks and costs all poets confront when they decide to bare their souls; but more particularly, it is about the special, all-too specific dangers that are the province of women alone. Those of us who, for whatever reason, remain silent should be grateful we have champions like Cathi Rae who feel the fear but speak out anyway.
Your Cleaner Hates You and other poems is available to purchase online, direct from publisher Soulful Group, as well as other bookshops and retailers.