Charlotte Gann reviews Beyond the Gate by Clare Best (Worple Press, 2023)
When I first opened this book somewhere in the middle I found myself reading a sonnet called ‘Rising in the night, in summer’. The poem took my breath away (it was one of those magical moments where I was reading the poem which I, at that moment, needed to read). On the face of it, it describes a fairly realistic scene – a mother being driven by her son:
[…] I’m okay because I’m
in the passenger seat – but in fact I’m not
okay because I’m stiff with fear
I like the way the poem’s sense of precariousness deepens as it progresses – “the car bounces and swerves through mist / above a chalky combe” – before arriving at its wonderful close, a short sentence of four single-syllable words: “The bats are there.” Wow. I see that car fly off the page and into some liminal realm. I look again, and it’s still a real (if dreamlike) scene. Again, and the whole thing’s a metaphor.
Throughout this rich collection the poet walks the line between physical and spiritual
Throughout this rich collection the poet walks the line between physical and spiritual. Take the opening to ‘Lark walk, February’ (a poem I remember first encountering in Best’s Springlines project and Little Toller book, which she co-created alongside artist Mary Anne Aytoun Ellis’s beautiful and distinctive Sussex paintings):
All the boundaries of the field lean in –
tangled hawthorn, lines of listing trees.
A dropped gate, off its hinges, rests
on slack wire at the join of path and track.
I can see this scene, have been there. 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. In Beyond the Gate she’s focused on “the boundaries”; “lines”; “join of path and track”. She’s interested in the intersections between … what realms? Tellingly, she opens the collection with a long excerpt from Audre Lorde’s ‘A Litany for Survival’:
For those of us who live on the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision […].
Beyond the Gate seems the perfect title for this collection, taking on its own metaphysical quality. And the title poem itself, which appeared first on The Friday Poem, is a great example of Best’s work, with its sense of solidarity and walking-alongside, building resilience over time and through consoling nature. I see this shadowy caravan of (female) figures emerging from the beautifully-noticed trees into the light – those trees may even be interchangeable with the women – and, of course, that procession takes on such reverence and gravity when offered “in memory of Sarah Everard / and all the others”. An instance where a dedication changes everything? It’s a bold move whereby the poet steers a theme (of violence against women) quietly but firmly into this book’s hinterland:
wild plum and wild pear
we are we are
scarred black-leafed still with fruit
walking walking
At perhaps the heart of this collection sits the section ‘Cinder Path’ – a grouping of five poems, starting with a longer one called ‘Salting’. The opening poem has a river flowing down the right hand sides of the pages, while a personal story unfolds alternately on the left (a device not dissimilar in effect, for me, to that employed in the collection’s title poem):
and when the bleeding ceased
I said nothing
I was mute
years later I can say
my body bled
I bled
silt where the river narrows
water sings over acorns stones
a frayed bough drifts and twists
These two elements complement each other – I hear “afraid” in that “a frayed”. At the same time, and again, I see a person walking through a natural setting, balancing herself, with loss and grief, in the solace of a quiet, free, nurturing environment. This is characteristic, to me, of Best’s work.
That word ‘mute’ too, brings for me an echo from another Audre Lorde quotation: “[…] we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.” Perhaps another edge this work pushes against is the edge of silence versus voicing, as the ‘Cinder Path’ poems explore their tender subject from various angles – “standing upon the constant edges of decision”. ‘What do we know?’ seems a powerful statement in support of a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy:
she suffers from night terrors
she’s a single mother
she loves her husband
she’s 13 she’s 49 she’s 28
her sister lives too far away
I enjoyed this book’s variety – in form and content. ‘Still life with lemon’, for instance: “Day 16. It has a smooth flat patch, the size of my thumbnail, / from relaxing on the glass. Rind yellower, darker.” Or the poem ‘T-Junction’, with its slide into surreal slow motion (reminding me faintly of Tomas Tranströmer’s ‘Alone’: “The seconds grew – there was space in them – / they grew as big as hospital buildings”). Best’s poem describes a collision with a motorcyclist – “when a life-size / black-leather human puppet arcs / over my bonnet” – before reality comes rushing back with all its noise and terror.
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
‘Geological section’ is a specular poem, hinging around its central line – “where the water table meets the surface”. It’s a signature form for Best: she does these beautifully. And I liked one poem’s rather delicious, long title: ‘Using Greenwood’s Large-Scale Map of the County of Suffolk (1825) to find my friend’s house’:
He calls it his lonely house –
this place at the land’s precarious rim.
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. Towards the close of Beyond the Gate is the poem ‘Self-portrait as boundary oak’. It seems to serve as a prelude to a closing group exploring the edge of life itself. It captures, for me, something of the essence of all the work. Inhabiting a liminal space between states. Walking a line that’s also, somehow, a threshold: “A few of us still mark the forest’s edge / though some are dead or tilting” she writes. Then,
it’s late – I breathe, and I listen to breath.
Charlotte Gann is an editor from Sussex, with an English degree from UCL, and an MA in Creative Writing and Personal Development from the University of Sussex. She convenes an online hub called The Understory Conversation. Her pamphlet, The Long Woman (Pighog), was shortlisted for the 2012 Michael Marks Award and her two full collections, Noir (2016) and The Girl Who Cried (2020), are published by HappenStance. Her new pamphlet Cargo is forthcoming this month from Mariscat.
