Frances Leviston wrote one of my favourite books of British poetry of the last decade: Disinformation (2015). She hasn’t yet published another, but there has been a collection of stories — all about characters called Claire — written with the same descriptive acuity about the physical world, cunningly revealing the feelings that lie beneath placid surfaces. “Plight” depicts a young woman at the pinch point of a dangerously passive family dynamic, in which the male siblings — the eldest over-rational, the youngest over-impulsive — might be the Freudian superego and id, leaving Claire as the poor ego struggling for self-realisation in the middle. What lifts it all to another level is the way Leviston’s narration is interrupted by sensuous paragraphs on the history of felt as a textile, which seem to have come from Claire’s rejected “creative critical” Art History dissertation, and in which what is felt is also what is not said: “As you work it, the felt shrinks. Its edges turn wavy, ragged; it ripples and the dips fill up with foam. You think it’s ruined, and sometimes it is; but sometimes its only approaching its new form. You pour on more water to rinse the fulling suds away, and then, when it’s relatively clean, you stretch it out to dry on a great frame called a tenter, from which we get the phrase ‘to be on tenterhooks’, meaning ‘to be suspended’.”

First published in The Voice in My Ear, Jonathan Cape, 2020.