The Clearing - a journal of nature, landscape and place.

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New Poems from Robert Peake and Jack Thacker

Collective A chastity of hawthorn, a smirch of blackberries, a wince of stinging nettle. Adam named the beasts, but the tribes of wildflower name themselves: You say “Grove of beeches.” They say, “Still below, ablaze above.” A papacy of silver birch, a memory-lapse of meadow grass, a smouldering of lichen. Who we are, who we…
Poetry
New Poems from Sally Flint

Dare The kingfishers appeared more like darting fish; their wings skimmed the dappled water, assured they knew the measure of every bend along their flight. We were surprised by their speed, how on the longest day they flashed like neon lights. Teetering across a path of stones laid in the shallows like…
Contributors G-M, Poetry
What Can Folk Horror Tell Us About Our Landscape? – Adam Scovell

Folk Horror is a term that has become synonymous with a wide variety of culture in recent years. From film and television to literature and music, the broadness of the description belies its potential to talk about a number of current issues. Though its description initially implies a symbiotic relationship between the narratives of folklore…
Poetry
Some Thoughts on Poetry and Fracking by Hugh Dunkerley

In 2014 I was asked to give a poetry reading at the anti-fracking camp in Balcombe, West Sussex. Thinking about what to read brought into focus issues which, as a poet and an environmentalist, I have been ruminating on for a number of years. Fracking is sometimes claimed to be way of reducing CO2 emissions…
Prose, The Clearing
New Poems from Marc Woodward

Calf Eye The clump of gawkers stood around to watch a digger lift the dead calf from the beach. A Devon Red, it’s beaten hide sand-caked, twisted legs flung out, lying like it might have dug it’s way up from a darker place, to die, satisfied, in ozone and light. The…
Poetry
Fell Year by Kelly Sullivan

Fell Year 1. As if there was snow. Petals across the paths, knee deep of them, the flowers battered in a gale and lightning raked across the patch of sky between apartment blocks behind. Only the alliums standing in scattered ranks but upright after attack. The slate flags heather and black…
Poetry
New poems from Richard Skelton

Richard Skelton is an artist, composer and publisher. He has written over seven books and thirty albums of music. Together with the Canadian poet Autumn Richardson, he runs Corbel Stone Press. The Cult Revived 1 is available from the Little Toller Bookshop. Beyond the Fell Wall, his monograph about the inanimate life of the Cumbrian…
Poetry, The Clearing
New Poems from Matt Howard

Reed sweet-grass A quarter acre of it, mowed down the low meadow for the clearing. Frost and stubble among the rides. Dominant and too coarse to bale, a day’s work, with rake and fork. An aesthetic of summer justified by muscle memory in February, slung from hip, back, shoulder and wrist – the…
Poetry, The Clearing
‘Edge States’ from Philip Gross

Edge States Mänttä /Jyväskylä, Finland, October 1. Sunlight, late in the year, the edge of winter. Light like stainless steel. Just out of hearing, the ring of its thin blades fencing with itself. Light like glass that, let fall on water growing harder at the edge of freezing, could break. Its splinters on…
Poetry, The Clearing
The Song of Place by Tim Dee

It stands to reason, but it is still striking for us rootless and shifting human types to learn that it is possible to see, and so believe, that the life living in a place is made from that place, built from it, made literally out of it. If you catch a great reed warbler on…
Poetry
Yggdrasil in Shetland, by Jen Hadfield

For National Tree Week, here is Jen Hadfield on the trees of Shetland. This piece is an extract from Arboreal, a new woodland anthology published by Little Toller Books. My aunt owns a cabin by a river in British Columbia. It’s wrapped in temperate rainforest, dense and protean: pockets of old-growth cedar and maple, the…
Poetry
New Poems by Rebecca Hurst

Familiar She has some small skill with these things making balm, potions, cooking almost— a dream of cooking. As when we were children making mud pies and jelly from yew berries; food we left for the birds, used to poison the gamekeeper’s needle-jawed dog. But she could make anything grow or fail:…
Poetry