GAY CLIFFORD

Gay Allis Rose Clifford, academic and poet was born in 1943 and sadly died of cancer in 1998 aged just 55. Gay was 35 when she wrote her first poem; and only 41 when, on Christmas Eve, 1984, she suffered a devastating cerebral haemorrhage that took her short-term memory and deprived her for many months of speech and movement, and for the rest of her life of her late-flowering and considerable poetic gift.

Germaine Greer, in the introduction to The Poems of Gay Clifford (1990), a collection of her poems selected by friends, wrote that "Gay Clifford the well-read, the thorough, the hard-working, the reliable, the punctilious, tore herself to pieces trying to say something truer than fact. Her monument was less than half-hewn when she was forced to abandon it, but it is more picturesque, more moving, grander, more sublime perhaps for that".

After Somerville College, Oxford, where she took a first in English in 1964 followed by a BPhil, Clifford went to the University of Warwick as a lecturer in medieval literature and later lectured in the Department of English at University College London for five years from 1979-1984. At both Warwick and UCL she cut an unforgettable figure.

Her perceptive essay Transformations of Allegory was published in 1974; and an affinity with allegory, a love of language games, and a vocabulary imbued with allusions to literary and poetic tradition from Euripides to Yeats, were to inform the poetry to which she later turned with an energy bordering on wilfulness. In 1979, Clifford won the Greenwich Festival poetry prize, she was published on both sides of the Atlantic, in magazines such as the London Review of Books. Her poetry, mostly in free verse, is a sinuously physical inventory of love and values, written with a wry eye for sexual politics, the delight in the absurd that made her the funniest of conversationalists is there, too; her dragon's-eye view of St George concludes "... the awful thing, what's really sad / Is that he took Andromeda to live with him / And when I 'phoned her she was using Vim / To shine his armour; he'd a new assignation/ Saving some other girl of noble station."

She married left-wing radicalism to a passion for personal order; not a file was ever out of place, not a surface unpolished, not a chic garment rumpled. In a black hole some years later, confronted by the unpleasant divorce that followed a short and stormy marriage, by Crohn's Disease and by what might delicately be called a strained relationship with her bank manager, she remarked that she seemed to be forbidden "the three best things in life: sex, black pepper and designer clothes".

Far beyond the neurosurgeons' most optimistic predictions, she was to conquer the brain haemorrhage that whited out her mind, slowly clawing back first words, then foreign languages, then her quick flashes of wit. That she did so was in great measure due to the heroic refusal of her parents, Pam and Freddie, who took her to live with them in Minchinhampton, to accept the finality of what they had been told was irreparable mental damage. Her long last battle with leukaemia was borne both by her and her mother, Pam, who survives her, with the grace that Gay Clifford always brought to the pressure which she had courted and had ultimately transformed, through poetry, into her personal medium.

Acknowledgments

• The Poems of Gay Clifford, Germaine Greer (Introduction) Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 1990
• The Times Archives, 1F, 23 Fri 23 Jul 1998. Gay Clifford: Obituary Features