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

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Alison Brackenbury: Three New Poems
Not a Victorian orchard tree which ladders wobbled round, no rose-red pippin, whose veined flesh old men in Kent once found. . .
March 25, 2016
Poetry, The Clearing
Oliver Rackham – What is the future for ash trees?
I dare not predict what will happen to ash. The recent cycle of Elm Disease is too uncomfortable a precedent. Who would have foreseen in 1970 that 40 years on the geographical…
March 23, 2016
Essay, The Clearing
Alexandra Harris – In pursuit of Edward Thomas
Spring arrives in Britain from the southwest, and makes a slanting progress across the country at the pace of between one and two miles an hour. So the phenologists tell us. In…
March 23, 2016
Essay, The Clearing
From ‘swims’ by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
swims is a long poem by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett documenting a series of wild swims across the UK. The poem starts and ends in Devon, her home county, but takes in Somerset, Surrey, the…
February 19, 2016
Poetry, The Clearing
Five New Poems from Annabel Banks
These poems are part of Annabel Bank’s practice-based PhD, ‘Poetry and the Archive’, which brings together material from the eighteenth-century letters of the Boulton and Watt Mining Company, archived in the…
February 4, 2016
Poetry, The Clearing
An Interview with Horatio Clare
Horatio Clare is a writer and broadcaster whose books include the Somerset Maugham Award-winning memoir Running for the Hills, the travel and nature book A Single Swallow, the children’s novel Aubrey…
January 21, 2016
Interview, The Clearing
Four New Poems from Polly Atkin
SOLSTITIAL We are drawn by a map of sweet ash winding through the twilit streets. There should be three fires: one of clean bones, one wood, one both. We…
December 3, 2015
Poetry, The Clearing
Karl O’Hanlon – Purdysburn House
The country house poem is sub-genre of topographical poetry popular in the seventeenth century. Famous examples exist by Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, and Andrew Marvell. In this form the poet would praise…
November 20, 2015
Poetry, The Clearing
Richard Skelton on his new film
In 2011, exchanging one coast for another, my wife Autumn and I returned to south-west Cumbria from mid-west Ireland. We had lived in, and made work about, the region before, but this…
November 6, 2015
The Clearing
‘Silken demon’: Two Animal Poems
This week in The Clearing two poems by Holly Corfield-Carr and Polly Atkin journey into the night to find species both familiar and exotic. BRAKE LIGHTS by Holly Corfield-Carr OOOOoOOOOAs she…
October 29, 2015
Poetry, The Clearing
Peter Larkin – Excerpt from ‘Eyes on Open Leaves’
“Eyes on Open Leaves” was suggested to me by a reference to a journal collection by the poet Lorand Gaspard called Feuilles d’Observation. It made me want to take the title literally…
October 16, 2015
Poetry, The Clearing
Yvonne Reddick – Towards Taw and Tor: Sources of Ted Hughes’s Inspiration
Yvonne Reddick is Visiting Research Associate at Wolfson College, Cambridge, concurrently with her Research Fellowship at the University of Central Lancashire. Her poetry is currently displayed at the Blackpool Illuminations and as…
October 2, 2015
Essay, The Clearing