Born in Hong Kong to English parents, Claire Cox now lives and works in Oxfordshire. Her interest in poetry developed later in life as a way of coming to terms with difficult times through the rear-view mirror of memory. With a keen interest in and concern about environmental challenges, she undertook a practice-based PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, on poetry and disaster.
Claire is co-founder and associate editor of ignitionpress, a specialist poetry pamphlet press, and winner of the 2021 Michael Marks Publishers’ Award. She was one of three winning poets included in Primers: Volume Five and winner of the 2020 Wigtown Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize. Her poems have also been anthologised, including in Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology and Angled by the Flood from which ‘Seasick’ features on the Joshua Jaswon Octet jazz album Polar Waters.
These poems are part of a series that explores childhood memories and issues around being a third-culture child. Brought up during the 1960s in the cross tides of British colonialism and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Cox wrote these poems to make sense of those early experiences from the perspective of her adult self and to process what the intervening years have held, personally and globally.
‘Mum’s Cheongsam’ is about a material object and the questions it poses about culture, legacy and inheritance.
Mum’s Cheongsam
Down from the attic, sleek with a sheen I’d call
greeny-blue and she, bluey-green. We might,
in the end, have agreed on turquoise-y.
Its motif – chrysanthemum sprigs for luck –
pale pink, petals of black and magenta.
Two knot fastenings at the neck
also shaped as chrysanthemums. Peonies
ghost the damask weave. High-collared,
deeply side-split, demure and alluring
in equal measure. It’s lined in sheerest green
(blue?) silk. Under the tight capped sleeves,
down the back and at the private place
where she must have sat, her sweat
has left tidelines. Perhaps she danced
before she dined, flirting hard with Dad’s business pals,
perhaps it was unbearably humid that night.
She may have excused herself, powdered
her perspiring top lip, pretended to be ladylike
unaffected by this strange tropical summer,
this thick slippery satin, tight
around her Devon-lass hips.
To complete her look, I remember
she wore a new human hairpiece
fixed precariously with countless hairpins.
She never really liked the dress, always said
it was uncomfortable to wear – its grip
a little too tight at her throat.
As well as the notebook that records the medication her mother received for cancer in her final days, Cox also has the desk diary her mother kept during 1960, the year Cox was born.
The Perfect Private Secretary No. 852
I’m here somewhere after Storm Warnings,
past where THE FAR EAST is a gridded map
and ‘Non-local’ bisects the EASTERN SEA: so,
Formosa, Samar, yes; Okinawa, Borneo, no.
I find it hard to think of myself as unfertilised.
Counting backwards, I could have been a New Year
slip up – the drunken coming together
of two twin beds. After all, I was always told
I was an accident. In a strong monsoon
the Black Ball will be hoisted over the harbour.
It costs $1.30 per each ⅕ oz to send a letter home.
Home is in Zone 2. In the year I was born
Good Friday fell on 16th April, and Empire Day
(imagine!) on 24th May. For them, I was clustered cells
and nausea. As I grew: John & Peggy for cocktails,
dinner at Repulse Bay Hotel, ‘Suddenly Last Summer’
at the flicks. September. And she has crossed me out
twice – my name, weight and time of birth.
I am rewritten under her mistake in capitals.
The eclipse of the moon has also been deleted.
Ruth sent bootees and chocs, Mrs Wong
a washing set. The Lathams preferred gladiolas,
as did my father. Gretchen sent a coat the day
my mother had her cyst removed.
We came home from hospital four days later.
I’d lost 8 oz. Lois visited. Someone has been practicing
their long division in the NOTES section, where father
has also written my name, once in lower case
and again in capitals. The cover is peach faux-leather.
It smells, still, of her perfume.
This poem offers a childhood perspective of the mid-20th-century Hong Kong riots.
Hide and Seek, Old Peak Road, 1967
We kids scatter. I know a place,
the press of silence and air unbreathed.
She gleams like an opal.
Beyond the mountain – Sha Tin, water buffalo,
ducks in wicker baskets –
they march, raise Little Red Books high in the air.
She’s tense around the jaw.
Firecrackers salvo on the waterfront, pigs’ blood and batons.
Her hatpin is jade holstered in the twist of her hair.
A typhoon races over the harbour.
The rain. The rain
and thunder. I hide in the dark
on the wardrobe’s top shelf
curl up between my mother’s hatbox,
my father’s secret machete.
