Beyond the Gate
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Beyond the Gate is rooted in a woman’s right to walk through streets and forests, through her own story. Clare Best plays compelling, original games with form. Her voice is fired by precision and observation, seared with a questioning wit. – Robert Hamberger
Shifting between the intimacy of the domestic space and a deep connection with the natural world, Best shows us beauty laced with danger, darkness, flashes of fear. This exploration of love and loss considers how we hold and carry our memories, how far ahead we dare to look – Rebecca Goss
Clare Best writes with scruple and clarity, listening always for the unsaid and the unsayable, watching for the passage of flame into darkness. – Michael Hulse
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Beyond the Gate is rooted in a woman’s right to walk through streets and forests, through her own story. Clare Best plays compelling, original games with form. Her voice is fired by precision and observation, seared with a questioning wit.
– Robert Hamberger
Shifting between the intimacy of the domestic space and a deep connection with the natural world, Best shows us beauty laced with danger, darkness, flashes of fear. This exploration of love and loss considers how we hold and carry our memories, how far ahead we dare to look.
– Rebecca Goss
Clare Best writes with scruple and clarity, listening always for the unsaid and the unsayable, watching for the passage of flame into darkness.
– Michael Hulse
Self-portrait as boundary oak
A few of us still mark the forest’s edge
though some are dead or tilting.
I’m fonder of bones than I was, proud
of creviced bark, circles of growth, years
enclosing heartwood. Each storm
sways me further out over a sandy field
or in towards crowded and earthy places;
it’s late – I breathe, and I listen to breath.
Shadows pencil my skin this cold afternoon
before the green blooding of spring.
Published: 1 June 2023
ISBN: 9781905208500
Pages: 88
“With this book Best reaches a level of poetic achievement that places her amongst the first rank of poets at work in the English language.” – John O’Donoghue, The London Magazine
“warmly intelligent, questioning collection” with “luminosity and moments of playful beauty. […] Best has united a wide range of poems with care and tact, in a way that seems to me in itself musical, so that the whole collection plays out its themes across the five inter-connected parts. […] Throughout the collection, Best is in conversation with nature. Country life, its people and history are present in almost all the poems. There are moments of pure delight.” – Alex Josephy, read the full review at London Grip
“Throughout this rich collection the poet walks the line between physical and spiritual. […] Part of what makes Clare Best’s poetry evocative is the observational precision she brings to bear – whether to her old, familiar, chalkland Sussex landscape or her newer adopted flatlands of Suffolk. She writes great ‘nature’ poetry. And something pronouncedly different. […] Her unifying themes – of nature and love and loss and consolation – reverberate throughout the book as we walk for a spell with this keenly-observant and deeply-informed poet.” – Charlotte Gann, read the full review at The Friday Poem.
“I had the sense that I, too, was on a walk, and these poems mirrored my own mental process when out doing so, anchoring me into the countryside at first but then, as I progressed, plumbing me in towards memories and recollections. […] excellent, intelligent use of form. […] [The poems] possess an in-the-moment, immediate quality that’s vital, vivid, refreshing, and very appealing.[…] finely written, deeply affecting poems.” – Mab Jones, Poetry Wales 59.3 2024
“Best’s language is resonant and precise […] Strong rhythms propel visual details and echoing sounds with generous spacings for pause and reflection, within lines and between sections. Music and Art infuse this gorgeous collection.” – Pam Thompson, Orbis
Clare Best’s first full poetry collection, Excisions (Waterloo 2011), was a finalist for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, 2012. Her second, Each Other (Waterloo 2019), was described in London Grip as ‘brimming with ideas, thinking, experiments with form, and intrigue’. Other poetry publications include Treasure Ground, Breastless, CELL and End of Season. Clare has held residencies at Woodlands Organic Farm in Lincolnshire, the University of Brighton and HMP Shepton Mallet. She thrives on collaborating with visual artists and with musicians and composers. Springlines, a project with the painter Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis, explores hidden and mysterious bodies of water across the South of England. Clare has co-created three chamber operas and a song cycle, and was a Fellow at Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2021. Her prose memoir The Missing List (Linen Press 2018) – written during the last illness of the father who abused her as a child – was a finalist in the Mslexia Memoir Competition 2015. Andrew O’Hagan wrote of this work, ‘a tapestry of time – brightly coloured, beautifully orchestrated, emotionally pure.’ The Missing List was cited by Dr Irene Gammel of Ryerson University, Toronto, as ‘an important, essential text in the context of the #MeToo movement.’ Clare lives near the Suffolk coast. clarebest.co.uk
