My film-poem 'Reverting to Type' up on the Magma website for their film issue.
Helen Clare
Poet and Educator with a thing for Science
Sunday, 2 September 2018
Tuesday, 12 June 2018
Manchester Poets Reading
I am reading this coming Friday at Chorlton Library. 7.30 for 7.45. It would be lovely to see you there.
Wednesday, 31 May 2017
Poetry Patch @ Burnage and Levenshulme Gardens
Poetry
Patch:
Time to put down
the spade, take off the boots, slip into a fine cocktail and savour the poetry
of gardens, plants and nature.
Shamshad Khan
recently transplanted from Levenshulme across Manchester , but is still blooming, Shamshad
has a collection Megalomaniac,
her poems are widely anthologised and she has performed on local and national
radio.
John Calvert is an
escapee from Accrington who put down roots in this part of Manchester . He runs Hard Rain, a poetry
workshop group with guests and performances at Thairish from 6pm on the last
Monday every month.
Helen Clare arrived
on the wind over a decade ago and is now established in Levenshulme, Helen
started her professional life as a Biology teacher. She has released a
collection Mollusc and a pamphlet Entomology.
As a finale,
Levenshulme resident and acclaimed singer-songwriter Claire Mooney will sing
two garden inspired songs, which she has written especially for the garden
festival.
The ticket price of
£10 includes a Buttery botanical cocktail.
Booking in advance
recommended.
Saturday, 23 April 2016
Rain Like Mercy
I've been a local celebrity this week, thanks to William Shakespeare!
Here's the poem I wrote for Radio Manchester, which they've filmed with lots of local people. It's a response to Portia's speech "The Quality of Mercy" from the Merchant of Venice, entitled "Rain, Like Mercy".
Here's my slot on Radio Manchester discussing it with Alison and Phil
And here I am on All FM chewing the fat with Lenny the Lounge Lizard and reading this poem and others
And here's the poem for you.
Here's the poem I wrote for Radio Manchester, which they've filmed with lots of local people. It's a response to Portia's speech "The Quality of Mercy" from the Merchant of Venice, entitled "Rain, Like Mercy".
Here's my slot on Radio Manchester discussing it with Alison and Phil
And here I am on All FM chewing the fat with Lenny the Lounge Lizard and reading this poem and others
And here's the poem for you.
Rain, like Mercy
Febuary, Manchester , we’re awash
with it. Drains are
overwhelmed. Cars
aquaplane, drenching passers
by. It drips
from the tents of the
makeshift city, muddies
premiership knees. It sits in
reservoirs
in hills above us, saved for
dryer times
piped to dryer places. We
built a city
on all this wet. We feel it
in our bones.
But under roofs and inside
glass there are those
untouched by it. So, shake it
off your brolly
in the bank. Let it trickle
from your coat hem
in the courts. Stamp your oozing
boots
on the town hall tiles. Let
it seep
into the dry places, dribble
on the great
and the good. Tempt them all
out in it –
from clerks to CEOs,
councillors,
chancellors and constables – shirts clinging,
socks wringing, all of them,
singing and….
Maybe, once in a lifetime,
all of us
should dance naked in it.
Understand
mercy through the skin, flesh
prickled
with it, carrying it with us
in our blood.
Saturday, 13 February 2016
Romance in the age of Tinder (Daily Telegraph)
An article in the Torygraph profiling amongst other books, The Emma Press's Anthology of Mildly Erotic Verse and featuring my poem A well-tempered keyboard.
Friday, 18 September 2015
Monday, 7 September 2015
Belonging
Here's the redraft of the poem written at Manchester Museum
Belonging
We came from
somewhere and now we are not there -
we journeyed across
the miles, the centuries
and over the strange
lands of our own lives,
sometimes with
nothing more than our names, our faces -
the death mask, the
label and the few things
we fastened to ourselves with buckles we
crafted
from iron or gold.
We pinned ourselves
to the
world around us by our naming of it.
We remembered
ourselves in the stories
we shared, in wolves
and forests.
Like tea or cotton we
belonged not to the land,
the trader, the
user, but to ourselves, though collected
and dispersed.
Alongside dodos, tree-frogs, moths,
we belonged to places
and the place changed.
We carried the few
coins it seemed we owned
until they left our
hands for the hands of others.
We made ourselves in
things, in the guard for a sword,
in paper, in gold.
We watered crops, collected butterflies,
heard ourselves in
bird song, and caged the birds.
We became the coin,
the buckle, the dagger.
We made sanctuary for
small pulsing amphibians
in tanks. We try, somehow,
to hold the world
together, with small
buckles and bandages as we bind
our dispersing
bodies with cloth. We buried our coins
and our dead to keep
them close. We named the place.
But we are always
leaving, like exhibits in crates,
cases lying empty,
waiting for work to be done –
until it seems that where
was never the thing at all.
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