Geraldine Clarkson

"The sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat..." (Book of Revelation). Poems of comfort and cream, of Lima, intimes, and home; still lives, still life, still alive... Bookish ruts, mystic prisons, spangles, cathedrals, islands, marshes; expungement; release. A small collection of torment and consolation.

A rottenness at the heart of things, mapped onto England - London and other cities, the Midlands - and various narratives, manifests via apocalyptic omens and curses, and things being upside-down; an underworld and stasis. The aromatic and romantic Medlar (Mespilus germanica, a member of the apple and quince family), is considered inedible until 'bletted', allowed to rot. The collection touches on themes of xenophobia, Brexit and hypocrisy, as well as dallying in the English hedgerows, lanes and forests, sometimes with the English poets, in pursuit of the regenerative chaos and mischief present in nature. There is a fugitive hope of flow and change, breaking out of old patterns; a quest for sweetness.

This remarkable debut collection from Geraldine Clarkson contains the uncontainable; wondrous, spellbound and daring poems, happy to roam from South American monasteries to the shorelines of memory. These bold, often witty and always hawk-eyed poems survey matters of faith, tragedy and womanhood.Elaborate, skilful and formally audacious, Clarkson is a poet of extraordinary and kaleidoscopic vision; her writing always richly riotous with detail, her poems possessing the singular ability to move from the maelstrom of feeling to the stilled moment with an assured, quick elegance. "The speaker of these poems is endlessly morphable and endlessly verbal; she can say anything and beguile us into listening: put our screens down and really listen and come to life again in the garden of her diction, her memory, her weird unassailable vision." – Kathleen Ossip"... one of the finest contemporary practitioners of the prose poem. A mind-rattling, heart-shaking debut." – A.B. Jackson

On Geraldine Clarkson's previous chapbook: "Joseph Brodsky wrote joyously about W.H. Auden's range of diction, claiming that Auden ladles from every puddle. Reading Geraldine Clarkson's astonishing debut pamphlet, Declare, invites the same response. Clarkson takes words from every conceivable field and makes them happy bedfellows. The risk of this highly-wrought, hyper-inventive approach is that it could become obscure or overly self-conscious. With Clarkson, neither of these is the case. The poems are sharply honed wonders of meditation that serve the subject and make powerful, complex sense. ... With a pamphlet this rich in brio, skill, and originality, Clarkson has the potential to be a significant and original voice in British poetry." - Daljit Nagra, PBS Bulletin

In 2015, The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press launched a nationwide scheme to find exciting new voices in poetry with Kathryn Maris and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, a final four poets emerged as clear choices: Geraldine Clarkson, Lucy Ingrams, Maureen Cullen and Katie Griffiths.Primers: Volume One now collects together a taster of poems from each of the four new poets. The brilliant chemistry of their poems proves to be a heady mix and a memorable journey – from post-war correspondents to foster families, breath-taking natural landscapes to strange, unsettling dream-like narratives and so much more in between. There’s plenty here to delight and dazzle, and ample evidence of a bright future ahead for contemporary poetry, as these striking and bold new voices demonstrate.