Claire Booker’s first full collection offers 46 pages of moving and memorable poetry from an iconic corner of England.
The South Downs lie at the heart of this book – the sunsets and huge skies, cliffs and fossils, fishing vessels and windmills, people and sheep.
In these poems, life erupts magically out of plum trees, winter shadows, a first kiss. Past, present and future collide within geological and emotional landscapes.
Love is as friable as chalk, and as deeply underpinned. A father, lost to dementia, is redeemed through the gift of a chocolate rabbit. A loved one returns in the shape of a trombone. Mothers, both human and animal, prove their strength.
A Pocketful of Chalk bursts with myth and metaphor, energy and originality. The giant of Wilmington leaves his hillside in an apocalyptic vision of global warming. A cow really does jump over the moon. Herons and Ospreys take flight, and a boy releases monsters from the sea shore.
“Booker uses metaphor brilliantly. This is an astonishing little volume full of compacted lyric masterpieces, profundities dressed in dissimulations which make you catch your breath as they are revealed. It thrills with what poetry is really about – love, death, creativity.” – David Pollard.
“Claire Booker sees everything with a storyteller’s eye and writes in a poet’s rich metaphoric language. The poems in A Pocketful of Chalk are simultaneously personal, universal, mysterious and revealing. This is a collection of remarkable honesty, breadth and depth.” – Janice Windle.
The South Downs lie at the heart of this book – the sunsets and huge skies, cliffs and fossils, fishing vessels and windmills, people and sheep.
In these poems, life erupts magically out of plum trees, winter shadows, a first kiss. Past, present and future collide within geological and emotional landscapes.
Love is as friable as chalk, and as deeply underpinned. A father, lost to dementia, is redeemed through the gift of a chocolate rabbit. A loved one returns in the shape of a trombone. Mothers, both human and animal, prove their strength.
A Pocketful of Chalk bursts with myth and metaphor, energy and originality. The giant of Wilmington leaves his hillside in an apocalyptic vision of global warming. A cow really does jump over the moon. Herons and Ospreys take flight, and a boy releases monsters from the sea shore.
“Booker uses metaphor brilliantly. This is an astonishing little volume full of compacted lyric masterpieces, profundities dressed in dissimulations which make you catch your breath as they are revealed. It thrills with what poetry is really about – love, death, creativity.” – David Pollard.
“Claire Booker sees everything with a storyteller’s eye and writes in a poet’s rich metaphoric language. The poems in A Pocketful of Chalk are simultaneously personal, universal, mysterious and revealing. This is a collection of remarkable honesty, breadth and depth.” – Janice Windle.
A Pocketful of Chalk is available at many bookshops, at www.arachnepress.com or by emailing bookerplays@yahoo.co.uk.