The Poems

We invite each of our featured poets to publish two poems on our website. This allows us to build a record of many Nottingham (and beyond) writers and performers, preserves a small part of each Dandelions Poetry evening, and provides another place for poems to be read and enjoyed by people who love poetry.

Claire Crowther

Photo credit: Caroline Forbes

Claire Crowther has published six collections of poetry and an essay collection, all with Shearsman. Her first collection was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Prize and she has been awarded a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has an MPhil and PhD in Creative Writing. She is Deputy / Reviews Editor of Long Poem Magazine and teaches poetry on the Creative Writing Diploma for Oxford University. Her new collection, Real Lear New and Selected Poems, was launched on October 8th 2024; Luke Kennard commented: ‘Crowther writes about this world, this country and this era with such accuracy and honesty you find yourself wrapped up in the mystic and otherly vision without question.’

Claire Crowther 

Separation

Snails might shout

crawling from mint to balm ‘I burn’

or call from lovage and hosta

‘I’m burning dry’

while my husband is falling asleep

away in the sun by Muker Beck

where oyster catchers freeze on their nests

and only water stays

awake, irritably controlled, pushing

stones, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, till we both are

woken by pain with its orange beak.

(first published in New Statesman)

The Apology

Mosquitoes charged me with their sour sugar

outside the vinegar house. Six years, ten years,

sixty, it ferments from oak to juniper

to chestnut to cherry and back to oak wood barrels,

balsamic vinegar separating itself

from a hundred year old mother sediment.

Breathe in through the unstoppered hole.

Smell it changing. This is immortality

but that sweet vinegar didn’t comfort my ill friend.

She hovered towards my slight sore throat.

I shouldn’t have let her low immunity near me.

My virus would order us differently,

her life for one ciao and down she goes

to that atomic level, eternal future,

for which our short lengthening time ferments us.

Next day I said to my body

(my body thinks my voice is God):

‘You handle poison too well.

Your itch denies my taste for eternity,

it’s anciently made.’ Then my body said,

‘I’m giving you time.’ So I called to say sorry.

(first published in Poetry Review)