Lectio Violant, by Steve Ely - Zoom launch

The Zoom launch of poet Steve Ely's new Shearsman collection, Lectio Violant, will take place on Tuesday, May 25th, at 7pm.

You can register to attend here. 

Official release date is May 7th, but you can buy the book now, or just find out more about it, here. 

And if you don't already know Steve's work, I can recommend it very highly. Oswald's Book Of Hours is possibly my favourite of his books, but they're all worth a lot of your attention.

RF Langley's Journals

This has been my recent reading. I don't know Langley's poetry that well, although I've enjoyed what I have read, but you really don't have to know it to get an awful lot out of this terrific book from Shearsman. Langley's eye for the tiniest details of the natural world, in particular, make it constantly surprising.

There's little doubt that keeping the journals must have fed into Langley's poetry-writing process too, though, and it's made me think of keeping one myself. At the moment, I scribble notes down constantly, and I do keep a sort of nature journal, but it's haphazard. I think my New Year resolution, of sorts, will be to make time to write a little in it every day.

And more RF Langley

No sooner had I mentioned RF Langley, than I came across this article – Helen Macdonald makes a great case for his Journals, available from Shearsman. They, along with the forthcoming Collected Poems from Carcanet, look like essential buys.

Helen's superb H Is For Hawk won the Costa Book of the Year award the other night, and deservedly so, too. I've been re-reading it this week, and finding new things to enjoy.

Some current reading

Back in March, I bought this book at the States of Independence book fair in Leicester. I started it with great enthusiasm, got sidetracked with other reading for reviews, and then picked it up again last week. I'm glad I did.

Matthias isn't a poet I knew anything about before (that says nothing about anything other than the self-guided nature of my wanderings through Poetryworld), and one thing that immediately struck me was that if these are his shorter poems, I'd like to see the longer stuff. There are some very short pieces here, but most clocks in at about the length that seems to be the standard in the UK. That's not to say it's over-written - it's sometimes sprawling in the very best sense, but that's all.

It just made me wonder about the length of poems. I'm as guilty as anyone of thinking that a piece is turning into an epic if it gets onto a second page, or past the 40-line mark (usually the limit in competitions), but maybe that's a peculiarly British thing?

Anyway, regardless of all that, it's a fine book (both the poetry within it, and as an object, which is always a plus for me).

So Here We Are

A combination of busy times at work (Birdfair and all that), lack of inspiration, and sheer bone idleness have resulted in updates here being a little sparse of late.

So, in the interests of doing a bit better at keeping abreast of what's going on in poetryworld, I'll try to blog daily for the next couple of weeks.

To start with, allow me to point you in the direction So Here We Are, from Shearsman, a collection of David Caddy's essays on poetry. Among the subjects covered are here Raleigh, Barnes, Sonia Orwell, Blake, Ethnopoetics, Salisbury, Griffiths, Bunting and Fitzrovia, Walking, Celebrity, Fisher's Place, Raworth's Comedy, the anti-pastoral, Prynne, Crozier, John Riley, David Gascoyne and Forests.

Shod takes top award!

I was delighted to see on Twitter last night that Mark Goodwin's Shod, published by Nine Arches Press, has won the East Midlands Book Award.

The worthy winner was announced by Ian McMillan, one of the judges, at the Lowdham Book Festival, with Shod chosen from this strong shortlist.

The book's very different from what you might expect from Mark if you've only read his (also excellent) Shearsman collections - I haven't seen any comments from the judges yet, but it's a book that rather transcends genres, a real one-of-a-kind.

Michael Haslam in Troytown

I've been reading Michael Haslam's Mid Life, Shearsman's fine collection of all the poet's works between 1980 and 2000. It's one of those books that, while undoubtedly coming from the non-mainstream end of the poetry spectrum, is far from being difficult or inaccessible. Much of Haslam's work has a song-like quality, which combined the persona he uses (a variation on the 'holy fool') makes it, above all, a lot of fun. The non-mainstream angle, more than anything, comes from the fact that every poem works off every other poem - it's not necessarily a book to dip into.

Anyway, no time to write anything like a proper appraisal, but getting close to the end today (and thinking I''ll have to order the collections he's published since 2000), I came across a not entirely typical passage in Singleton's 10p Recital mentioning Troytown. I thought I'd share it...

The crashing in of banks to flood.

The what we did.

The river bed of weeds and mud.

The hollow cove of grass.

The green and grey.

The silver dale.

Another mudbank crashes.

Flock bleeps out on mussel bed.

The what we said.

A ton of feathers on my head.

A ton of lead.

A single seagull and a simple tune.

The fall of Troytown

on the Banks of Lune

whence all the indigenes are flown.

Web wanderings

Given that I spend absurd amounts of time trawling the web at work, a disturbing amount of really good stuff slips under my radar. Clearly I should be looking a bit more closely rather than just amassing trivia which I can then put to use on Sporcle.

So, I’ve only just realised that Tony Frazer, of Shearsman, has a blog, and that he’s just published Elisabeth Bletsoe’s first three collections under one cover. I’m a big fan of Shearsman, who not only have some great poets on board but who also take care to make their books things of beauty. Bletsoe’s someone I’ve read too little of, but what I have seen I've liked a lot, so this will fill a gap in my knowledge.

I’ve also only just noticed that Hand + Star, the poetry reviews site, also features some original poetry. All sorts of good things there when you start looking.

Stride is an old favourite, and I really enjoyed reading the latest batch of reviews. Jeremy Over’s book sounds right up my street, so when the purse-strings allow…

And finally, a bit of a heads-up for this fundraising reading taking place in Leicester tomorrow. Sounds like a varied line-up of writers, it’s a lovely venue, and it’s for LOROS, a cause very close to my heart.

Poets on fire

Last night, it was straight down the A46 to Royal Leamington Spa for the launch of David Morley's The Night Of The Day, from Nine Arches Press.

A couple of hecklers, one of them particularly persistent and totally irrational, could have spoiled things, but David was unshaken and gave a very energetic, celebratory reading that was an absolute pleasure to hear. There was excellent support from Myra Connell, Matt Nunn, George Ttoouli and Simon Turner, too, and some good open mic-ers. I bought copies of David's pamphlet (a limited edition version, in fact) and of George's new collection, Static Exile (from Penned In The Margins), and both made me think about how much better poetry books look these days, even before you get to the contents. I feel a long blog post coming on, but it will have to wait until another day.

Today, the new issue of Sphinx arrived, and a real cracker it is too. So far I've only had chance to read the interview with Tony Frazer of Shearsman, which is worth the cover price alone. Shearsman have being going from strength to strength these last few years, and there are quite a few of their books that I'd number among those volumes I always like to have to hand, so it's great to hear just how Tony has managed such a prolific, and high quality, output.

Also today, a woodcock flushed almost from beneath my feet in Cademan Woods, another flying across the road at Copt Oak, and owls, owls, owls at Cossington.

Lee Harwood

Lee Harwood: Not The Full Story – Six Interviews by Kelvin Corcoran (Shearsman)
The Salt Companion to Lee Harwood, edited by Robert Sheppard (Salt)

Shearsman’s publication of Lee Harwood’s Collected Poems in 2004 kickstarted a new wave of interest in a writer who, in truth, should never have been off the radar in the first place. Harwood’s unique position as a direct link between the New York School and non-mainstream British poetry should have been enough, on its own, to keep him in the eyeline of anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry, but these two books help confirm his stature as a major figure.

The Shearsman volume here, published to coincide with a Selected Poems released earlier this year, takes a broadly chronological approach to Harwood’s career, with Kelvin Corcoran leading Harwood gently through his collections.

One of the things that makes it so enjoyable a journey is that Corcoran, himself a fine non-mainstream poet (and like Harwood, one whose work is wonderfully multi-layered but rarely deserving of the dreaded adjective ‘difficult’), eschews too journalistic or academic an approach. Instead, the whole thing reads very much like the relaxed discussion of two friends (which I’m sure it is), and in taking such a casual tack, Corcoran gets as close to the heart of the matter as you suspect anyone might.

Harwood sheds plenty of light on his writing methods, the background to much of his poetry (particularly the contraction and dissolution of the British Empire, obliquely referenced in much of his earlier work), his (thoroughly professional) approach to readings, and his connections to the US avant-garde scene.

Two things struck me. One is that Harwood rarely seems to have thought in terms of the binary division of British poetry that so often gets talked about. That’s not to say that he doesn’t have something to say about how certain sections of the mainstream have ignored or sidelined certain sections of the avant-garde, but he seems acutely aware that both the two main camps are subdivided into countless smaller groupings, and to have seen his own poetry as being exactly what it is, and no other, carrying connections to all directions. When, on one or two occasions, Corcoran does aim a jab or two in the direction of famous mainstreamers, it comes across as unnecessary sniping, not least because Harwood doesn’t get drawn into it.

Secondly, Harwood talks about his dislike of the poet intruding into the poems too much (both when he’s writing and reading them), and indeed his knack of removing himself from centre stage is, I suspect, one of the things that appeals most to readers about his poetry. He mentions the use of personas and multiple points of view to do this, but nevertheless you are struck by how much the Harwood of the interviews resembles the Harwood that you imagine from the poems – deeply humane, incurably curious, quietly humorous, and thoroughly good company.

That’s not to say, by the way, that he’s unsuccessful in taking himself out of the poems – far from it. In fact, I think it just shows how subtly the trick is done, and how deceptively easy he makes it look.

Poems particularly relevant to a number of the interviews are dotted throughout the book, plus a few photographs that largely absolve Harwood of the crimes of fashion and coiffuring that might be expected of a poet whose career stretches back to the early 60s, but for the most part this book does just what it says on the cover, and does it very well.

The Salt volume, on the other hand, collects together an interview with Harwood plus 12 essays from a variety of critics and fellow poets. They all tackle different, sometimes radically different, aspects of Harwood’s work, so while there’s a certain amount of overlap, each is self-contained enough to make this perfect for dipping into.

I won’t even attempt to encapsulate everything that’s here, but I particularly enjoyed Robert Sheppard and Geoff Ward’s essays, the former for its tracing of a Puritan/Cavalier tension in Harwood’s work, the latter for its look at the opposition between wide-eyed innocence and a more knowing, self-consciously literary approach.

Andy Brown’s eco-critical reading of Harwood is probably the highlight for me, though, as he attempts to get to the roots (pardon the pun) of the poet’s relationship with a wider community and with the natural world.

Again there’s an opposition, this time between the city and the country, but Brown also touches upon how Harwood’s poetry often subliminates the self into the landscape. He also set me thinking about how (and I’ve mentioned this before) Harwood often seems to use nature and the rural landscape to remind himself of just how various the world is. While Sheppard, earlier on, talks about Harwood enjoying the “seductions of puritan enumeration” in his listing of bird calls within a poem, you get the feeling that there’s more to it than satisfying a cataloguing impulse.

What else can I say? Nothing really, other than to make the obvious point that if you’ve enjoyed the poetry of Lee Harwood, you’ll also enjoy both these books a great deal, providing as they do a long overdue setting of his work in a wide context.

STOP PRESS: Just before I posted this, I was searching on iTunes for Julian Cope albums. For some reason, the search also turned up Writers At Warwick, from which you can download lengthy interviews and readings from the likes of Lee Harwood, David Morley, and Ann Stevenson. So I did.

Mark Goodwin: Else

Over the past year or so, I've seen Mark Goodwin read a couple of times, and he's been excellent on both occasions - entertaining, but also thought-provoking and genuinely enthralling.

I've recently finished reading his Shearsman collection, Else, and it fully lives up to expectations. He falls broadly into the non-mainstream/innovative camp, but what I enjoy about his work is that, while he attempts to stretch language into all sorts of new shapes, his concerns and ideas are always firmly grounded in the everyday, with a particular attention to ecological matters. He's a real master of the urban pastoral, too, or more precisely of documenting that fringe between the urban and the rural.

There's a real physicality to the language that it's impossible not to relish, and at times Goodwin coins evocative, spot-on word compounds that feel almost Anglo-Saxon, or like Old Norse kennings.

I will get round to writing a proper review of the book sooner or later, but for now there's one in the new issue of Tears In The Fence, which I've been enjoying. Other highlights for me so far include poems by John James and Luke Kennard.

Beneath The Rime, by Siriol Troup

Siriol Troup comes from a Welsh family, but was born in Hong Kong and spent most of her childhood and teenage years abroad, in Africa, Germany, Holland and Iran. She read French and German at St Hugh’s College, Oxford and later returned there to teach 19th and 20th century French Literature.

Beneath the Rime, from Shearsman, is her second collection of poems, following Drowning Up The Blue End, which was published in 2004 by Bluechrome. I interviewed her by email about the book and her writing in general. Read on to see the results, plus a couple of sample poems...


Could you tell me a little bit about your path to publishing your first collection?

I wrote a lot of poetry as a teenager but stopped when I went to university, and didn’t return to writing until after I’d had my four children. I was in the middle of trying to write yet another (terrible) novel, when a frozen shoulder left me unable to sit at a desk or computer for any length of time without being in agony. So I started writing poems again, mainly because they were shorter than novels and I could work on them at odd moments during the day. I sent some off to competitions, won a few prizes, which was very encouraging, and in 2002, I won the Poetry Monthly Booklet Competition, for which the prize was publication of a pamphlet of 25 poems (Moss) – which used up virtually everything I’d written since getting the frozen shoulder. A year or so later, Bluechrome wrote to ask if they could publish a first collection and in 2004 they published Drowning Up The Blue End.


Your own background is very cosmopolitan. How far has that helped you take a rather more oblique and original approach than your average British poet?

I suppose the main advantage of my background – living abroad and, more particularly, studying languages and European literature – is that my reading has been (and still is) very varied and I’ve always had to pay a lot of attention to semantics – the roots of individual words, their context, their connections, the cultural baggage they contain, the ghosts behind them. I once spent a whole afternoon listening to academics and translators discuss the difficulties of translating the German word unheimlich – that’s the sort of thing I find fascinating. I gave my husband the 20-volume OED for Christmas and almost wish I hadn’t – it’s such a distraction.


Many of the poems in the new collection are written in different personas – animal as well as human. Is this a way of tackling subject matter that might be more difficult to approach from a more obviously personal point of view?

Using different personas probably comes from my background in languages. I’ve got used to putting on voices, inhabiting minds other than my own. Getting under the skin of an elephant in the Coliseum or a dog hauling sledges to the North Pole opens up a whole world of possibilities, which is liberating for me as a writer and, I hope, for the reader too. It’s got to be more interesting than always droning on about myself. And as you suggest, it’s a way of approaching difficult subject matter more obliquely – death, sex, politics of gender, the sort of issues that might sound strident or pretentious if expressed in my own voice.



I particularly enjoyed the Infanta poems. Do you approach a sequence like that with a clear idea of how it will be structured, or is it more a case of worrying away at the same itch because you're continually drawn back to it?

Worrying away at an itch describes it perfectly. I’d done a lot of research on the Infanta and her family, and on Velázquez and his painting techniques, and I knew I wanted the sequence to have a loose narrative structure, but I had no idea how many poems I’d need (or be able) to write. I wrote about a dozen, then stopped and went on to other things. But I found I couldn’t get the Infanta out of my head, so I went back and wrote some more. From time to time, I still play around with a couple of poems I left out of the final sequence.


Tell us a little about your writing process – I liked very much the fact that, despite the strong narrative threads in many of the poems, you always allowed language to take centre stage. That seems to me to require a very difficult balancing act between careful crafting and spontaneity.

When I first have an idea for a poem, I try to sit on it for a few days before I start writing. The first draft usually comes quite quickly, then I put it away and come back to it later – weeks or even months later, if possible, so that I can look at it objectively and see what works and what doesn’t work. I rewrite obsessively, often going through dozens of drafts, but I try not to leave the original draft too far behind because those first sparks, although they’re often clumsily or ponderously expressed, are what give a poem its energy. A handful of poems in Beneath The Rime came fairly quickly – Detachment, Caged Elephants, Wall and some of the Infanta poems, for example – but the majority took me years to finish. Even now, I’m still working on poems I started six or seven years ago.


What was the process of publishing with Shearsman like? Was there a lot of editorial guidance?

Publishing with Shearsman has been wonderful. I can’t imagine a better experience. To give you an example: when Tony Frazer took Beneath The Rime, he told me he needed to trim the number of pages in the MS, and he pointed out five possible candidates for exclusion, though he was happy to hear appeals in their favour. If he’d chosen what I considered the best poems in the book, I would have questioned not only my own judgement, but more importantly, his – but the poems he picked out were precisely the ones I had reservations about myself. Throughout the process, he’s been responsive and insightful without ever being overbearing. His cover designs are brilliant, and his commitment to poetry from all over the world is really inspiring.


Country Living

Monday to Friday we’re alone with the rabbits,
Madame and I. Up at dawn with the smell
of wet straw and piss-a-bed, the piebald does
spaced out on ammonia behind the wire.

I slip the bolts, hear them jolt as I enter,
a skitter of hearts and toenails, whiskery hysterics.
Madame smacks my wrist: speak to them gently,
reward them when they come.

She calls them each by name, nuzzles and smooches,
nibbles their loose fur, their dippy tails –
mes biches, mes pucelles, mes allumeuses.
I clean their water-bowls and disinfect their beds.

On Sunday, she blocks her ears and weeps
into the casserole. Monsieur lays down his fork
and strokes her hand, then tucks in with relish,
slurping the thick juice until it trickles down his chin.

Pauvre Geneviève!
I take the afternoon off, light a candle
to St. Gertrude, let a boy in the market-place
stick his fist up my skirt.

The night I leave, I fill the bowls with foxgloves,
ivy, corn-lilies, creeping butterweed.
Push my fingers through the mesh.
Watch them come to me like whores.


Thirst and Slake

End of summer: the earth crackling like bark,
every layer peeled back, keening for rain.

How long it goes on – this see-saw
of dust and water, thirst and slake;
the leafing and unleafing of the trees.

No wind tonight. The moths hang
in the dark like flowers waiting to drop.

What pleasure to feel the whisper
of the mosquito! – his sly harpoon,
the itch of blood and hide, the flooding
of proteins and saliva; to know there will be
nights like this – rich-scented, wanton
with favours; the rustle of limbs
before the rains begin.

The Clockwork Gift, by Claire Crowther

Claire Crowther's poems and reviews have been published in a wide variety of UK and North American journals and anthologies, and her pamphlet Glass Harmonica appeared from Flarestack in 2003. Her first full collection, Stretch of Closures, appeared from Shearsman Press in 2007, and was shortlisted for the Jerwood/Aldeburgh Best First Collection prize in 2007. Her second collection, The Clockwork Gift, appeared in February of this year.

She was awarded a bursary by Kingston University to complete the book, and was also poet in residence during 2008 at Dorich House, Kingston on Thames, a museum dedicated to the life and work of sculptor Dora Gordine.

I interviewed her via e-mail about the The Clockwork Gift, and the results are below, along with a couple of poems from the book. I hope you enjoy them...

I write a lot on Polyolbion about pamphlet poetry, and I notice that you had a pamphlet, Glass Harmonica, published before your first collection. Is this a publication route you'd recommend to new poets?

The useful thing about publishing a shorter collection, for your first one, is that you can practice selecting and ordering a smaller number of poems. These are challenging tasks, I find. Get them wrong and some poems can be weakened. But nowadays pamphlet publishers often work through competitions – this must be good for a small press and I can see that it drives the standard up in some cases – but it could make it more difficult for a new voice to find a home. A prizewinning collection has to be strong from the off and I regret that there may be fewer of those personal relationships where a pamphlet publisher discovered a new voice and supported, even mentored, the poet to improve the collection. Charles Johnston at Flarestack performed just that role for me. I am deeply grateful.


There are a lot of ghosts in your new collection, The Clockwork Gift. Are they a necessary personification of memory?

Yes, that’s right, these are personified memory – rather than, say, relating particular memories. I am less interested in memory as anecdote than in memory as a social, political or emotional tool – ghosts are always interesting and they may summon up fear, which is the emotion I am most interested in. I am working on a new collection which has the working title of Afraid. The ghost of a grandmother in The Herebefore is a composite character meant to represent the lost women poets of previous generations rather than a picture of my own grandmother. But my grandmothers gave me lots of source material for poetry. I had an English and an Irish grandmother. When I was very young, my English granny gave me a book of Keats’ poetry which she had bound herself. I still treasure that. She also kept a stack of News of the World papers under the cushions on her settee and I was full of envy for this reading mountain – I had to climb it to sit down. Then I could look at the lurid photographs inside. I still remember one photo of a crowded farmhouse kitchen table – in the middle of which was a small round plate with a human heart on it. What shocked me most was a hand-drawn arrow pointing to the heart – not drawn by my granny but by the murderer whose case the paper was relating.


There’s also a lot of tension and internal debate in the collection about the role and value of books and literature. Do you see that creation of “unnaturally pressed sense” as ever more important in our internet-dominated culture?

Partly I am playing out my role as a writer of poems in such poems – always a source of tension (because what exactly is that role). And I do see the paradox of being addicted to compressing sense, as poets are, when expanding it is so fashionable. I’ve been given an electronic reader and it’s odd to hold 150 perfectly readable books somehow melded together inside a palmtop-sized device. Internet-led forms of writing such as email or updates have their own fascinating habits of compression. I have tried several times to write poems using those forms – but the poems don’t work very well yet! There’s no doubt they have given me other voices to use.


One of the things I enjoyed most about the book was the willingness (this was something I also liked about Andy Philip’s recent book) to create your own myths. Poets seem to have been scared of this for some years now - is it something you see making a comeback?

That’s an interesting question – I wonder if this is happening. Myth is so often invoked in poetry that I am surprised more poets haven’t had a go at doing their own. Of course, myth must be the repository of a society’s experience and it is a rather grand claim that I’m the voice for that in a myth I have made up. Yet can I be anything else? In the end, I decided the stories about ‘otherness’ and social damage that I wanted to tell were strengthened by creating a mythic figure (the thike).


One of the book’s main themes is the role of grandmothers. Can you tell us a bit more about how you approached this? And was the poem Names as enjoyable to write as it is to read aloud?!

I loved writing Names! Of course I had about ten dozen other names than the ones I used and the fun was choosing which would work together as lines and stanzas. I read aloud all the possible combinations, as I do with all poems as they grow. I did a lot of research – three years’ worth – about aspects of grandmotherhood, medical, economic, historic, mythic, including having several new grandchildren of my own during this time. I collected many many grandmother poems by other poets and wrote a couple of academic papers on those poems. While all this was going on, I wrote a grandmother journal and the poems just cropped up as I went along.


Without making it explicit, there seemed to me to be a very strong environmental concern running through many of the poems, with lots of images of decay and transformation between the human and the rest of the natural world. Is this a strand you see yourself pursuing further?

Yes, without doubt. My partner is a solar energy scientist and his life is dedicated to experimenting with new forms of solar energy to help overcome some of the problems we face as an oil and nuclear using society. We talk continually about the issues that arise from his work and, though I rarely set out to write about those issues directly, they influence the political thinking that is behind every poem I write – as it has to be behind every poem written. The new collection is bringing in some aspects of this more directly than usual – though I need to be sure these new poems are working well before I publish them.


Finally, could you tell us a bit about your experience of Shearsman as a publisher? How do you go about putting together a collection?

Tony Frazer at Shearsman has been an excellent publisher and editor – efficient, visionary and full of energy. I was impressed with his list and so approached him about my first collection. I already knew the feel of the press from Shearsman’s journal which I had published work in. After his acceptance, I made many changes to the set of poems, amending poems, adding poems, subtracting poems – and he encouraged this without ever dominating the process. I feel I managed this process better with the second collection than the first – to me, it’s almost like constructing a long poem or poem series. There are aesthetic and semantic choices (and mistakes) to be made. I understand other publishers can be slower to respond to poets than Tony is and I’m very grateful that he did not keep me waiting for months or years for an initial acceptance. He is also very good at cover design and sourcing cover images. Both my covers are all his work. The only thing we have ever disagreed on is the title of the first collection – he didn’t like mine and I disliked the one he suggested. In the end, I came up with a long list of other titles – he decided his three favourites, I decided mine and the one overlapping title was it!

Key Stage
for Bessie, who suffered from dementia

In a shop
where keys are copied,
my daughter asks for her own.

The boy takes mine.
His overalls are oily from the machine.
We wait.

She reminds me: ‘You must carry it
always, it locks you out
as well as lets you in. If it sticks

to begin with, don’t panic.’
It wears smooth in time.
She has gone

out for years without me.
Now she will come home alone with my key,
enter my emptiness as an adult,

bar out the night
whose shine
is from dead stars,

and accept what she sees of me
through doors
she has opened.

Experience

The woman let off Death Row walked through a gorge
of chaotic limestone left by meltwater
and saw men everywhere.

They were climbing the steep and overhung sides.
Their feet flexed in thin shoes, toeing
crevice after crevice.

Their hands pried the split crag for brokenness.
They hung
and carefully worked out each nodule of rock

rejecting the frailty of this or that stone,
clicking in the knot
that would hold them from falling back to the passage.

She ignored arrows, made her own path
through tall-stalked, small-headed ferns and young ash,
past a feral goat, newish horns knuckling up,

across cinquefoil-buttered grass, near-invisible swellings
of bluebell seed, a memory of leaving home –
or maybe a promise.

The climbers weren’t enjoying the view.
They climbed for the sake of the stone. One stopped
in a patch of sun, refusing to carry on

trusting the handshake of rock and rope
though below each man another looked up
holding a thin string.

She was looking for innocence
like an older woman standing over her young husband
allowing an undoing of long hair.

First published in Poetry Wales

Finally, for an excellent review of The Clockwork Gift, go to Rob Mackenzie's blog Surroundings, or to hear Claire reading some of her poems, go along to Poetcasting.

Promises, promises

I keep mentioning various items that I'm going to post up here, and never quite getting round to finishing them. It's busy, busy, busy over the next couple of weeks, too, so they might have to wait just a little while longer. But they will happen, eventually. Honest.

In the meantime, though, something to really get your teeth into. On Monday, I'll be publishing an interview with Claire Crowther, whose Shearsman collection The Clockwork Gift I've been enjoying hugely these last few weeks.

Her first collection, Stretch Of Closures, was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Best First Collection Prize, and the new book has already garnered plenty of critical praise, with Matthew Francis writing: "Very few poets create their own unique world. Claire Crowther does, and it's all the more rich and strange for being made of language. She's one of the most original and imaginative poets now writing."

I couldn't put it better myself, so look out on Monday for that interview, plus some sample poems.