Clare Best writes of the things of the world, and of the moments in our lives, as if they bear within them secrets of mortality that words will never quite have the power to reveal. She writes with scruple and clarity, listening always for the unsaid and the unsayable, watching for the passage of flame into darkness.
Michael Hulse
Despite pain, loss, hardship, and the turning of our emotional seasons, including moments of ‘bleak despair’, there is gratitude; despite the fact that, like all of us, ‘My time here will soon be done’, we must walk; and, if we choose to, we can ‘marvel’, we can ‘sing’ as we go. Mab Jones
Clare Best’s poetry dazzles with the clarity of its chiseled phrases and its measured form.
Eva Karpinski
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.
(from Beyond the Gate, Worple Press 2023)
Clare Best 