The Longhouse

Backlit by a flickering hearth

each room is a stage

applauding its audience.

Silence twines speech

into smoke-threads

the talk of wool and milk

twin whitenesses spinning

days into decades. Time

passes like a finger sliding

along a grained surface.

A pony returns riderless

snow coming down

warm bread in the panniers.

Everything unchanged

for a few more moments

the time it takes for the

snowflakes to fill footprints

coals to cool in the grate

oak beams to soften

leaving the roof nothing

for support but the attic’s dust

the house’s adumbrations.

Golden Plovers

He does not know the names

of the trees hooked into the sky

but their twisted forms are familiar

drawn by gales on the days that didn’t arrive

burned up in their own sunrise like golden plovers.

Now just the weightlessness of things

walls tumbled, the livestock all gone,

leaving only the torn edges of the fields

his square mile a sail ripped from its mast

left to billow overhead like golden plovers.

As he passes the twmp’s open mouth

he tries to answer his fathers’ questions,

tell them of seas beyond the whalebacks.

But, like them, he knows only long winters

and life concealed like golden plovers.

What remains as he is washed away

are the long days where he disappeared,

flowed out into the hill with the bracken roots,

his hours still there, waiting for the last light

to catch, when they’ll glow like golden plovers.

Across the Sound

Here is a gathering of those things

that constitute seabirds

the pipes, reeds, frets and strings,

and the notes produced – all westerlies.

From the cliffs you can hear spaces

in their music, narrow and infinite,

silences that draw voices in tides.

Now the white notes are blown

from the page, they wheel endlessly

suspended above this egressing sea.

And where next?

To the places not in need of names,

the blue isles merging into others,

adrift on a gyre, dragged by rivers

that flow from pole to pole.

Like us, once out of site

of the overwintered world,

they will dive into the dark

and feed.

James Roberts lives in the Black Mountains. He co-edits Zoomorphic magazine. Recent poetry has been published by Agenda and Cinnamon Press. A novella “The Man in the Mountain.” was published in 2015.

The Hare in the Snow

My eyes adjust to a sky

as blank as a headache, a landscape

of snow-cloud florescence.

I walk across covered ploughed fields,

down delicate blackthorn hedgerows,

when a few feet away a furrow breaks for cover –

it runs

it runs and runs

and runs

bounding over whiteness, shedding whiteness

and where it lay, a crucible of melt

retains its white-hot heartbeat.

Barn Owl

My cave drip footsteps fill the barn

before I sense the silent sound

of wing in darkness –

a carpet beat out of my dimension,

sent from the vacuum of space,

a pure white blade

of soft steel – I see a feathered baby

face. With torchlight I follow

its flight path

as it traces a scythe on the night sheet

and is posted through a hole

in the velvet.

The Falconer

One day, he asked me would I like to

handle the hawk? I declined the offer.

How could the bones of the creature weigh

only as much as air? Its talons tightened

onto his stove gloved hand.

But the talent of hawks was lured by his wrist.

He’d release his Harris to the heavens

and watch it disappear – we’d turn our heads

and try to predict the stretch of skyline

from which it would return.

BRAKE LIGHTS
by Holly Corfield-Carr 

OOOOoOOOOAs she takes the corner into Cannock Chase,
she sees a red moon wobbling over conifer,
OOOOOOOOOnervous retinal scan of the night’s blind eye
turning against the wood as she turns here,

OOOOOoopropels through high beam like a comet reversed
and lancing the dark, like the moth’s green meteor
OOooover the windscreen, like the neon tubing of deer eyes
at the roadside, the fast pelt into fern as she passes,

OOOOOsitting in her own pocket, continually turning itself
inside out onto tarmac in a trail of oil and hot air,
OOOOOstill cut with all her mis-sung lines and fart and half
of all her uplit conversations.

OOOOoOOShe bowls downhill. The red tops of the conifers
wince shut the bloodshot moon and the whole
OOOOOoOOOOObrutal fuss of the forest is gone. She sings
her heart out. Closes her eyes. Drives.

OOOOOOOOooOAhead and from behind the dark tarpaulin,
the deer toes the edge of the road, bright strip
OOOOOooOof heat, stands to shake the night from her back,
listening to the overlapping lunacy of the birds

OOOOOoooowhen the light skewers her. And she holds her
face in the half cup of her hands on the wheel,
OOOooOOOthe brace of her reflection over her animal face,
a sudden, illegible selenelion —

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooOwhich is two bodies reminding
OOOOOOOOOOOOOeach other they are bodies
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooOOin time

PROPITHECUS CANDIDUS, 1871

by Polly Atkin

When your spirit returns its shape is revealed
by a fuzzed white halo – iron filings
in negative – tracing your moving field
through the trees. Your face is concealed, only
your eyes and voice blare out. Night
gloves your fingers, muffles the putt
of your landing, soft, outside their door.
Sleeping, they are not frightened of you.
They do not know you, or what you will mean.
Your seven songs.
OOOOOOOOYour hushed leap.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYour ancestors’ journey.
You have none of the cunning of my species, silken
demon. You never learn to attack
or run. You watch through lenses of dim
fire like the embers of forests, mark
your place and are gone. As quick as a continent
shuffles north, as an ocean gyre
shifts to reverse.
0000000000From an unknown height
you howl the lament of the restless dead.
Your strange trajectory.
OOOOOOOYour sweepstake hypothesis.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYour solitary territory.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYour dynamo hum.

Holly Corfield Carr is based in Bristol and Cambridge where she is working on a PhD in site-specific writing. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Frieze Writer’s Prize in 2015. Her pamphlet MINE, documenting a series of performances in an eighteenth-century crystal grotto, was published by Spike Island in 2014.

Polly Atkin’s second poetry pamphlet Shadow Dispatches (Bridgend: Seren, 2013) won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize, 2012, and was shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year, 2014. In June 2014 she was awarded New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize, for work in progress which ‘reflects a strong sense of place or the natural environment’. Her poem ‘A short history of the moon’ won the 2014 Wigtown Poetry Prize. She lectures in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow). She is currently completing her first full collection of poetry, and a monograph exploring the connections between Romantic legacies, contemporary creativity, ecopoetics, tourism and place. 

These collections explore many of the themes at the heart of The Clearing: ecology and folklore, the complex relationships between people, plants and animals, and the links between language and landscape, the domestic and the wild.

THE CRAB

by Isabel Galleymore

Sunbathing on basalt,

the crab is a miniature

cedarwood stage

moving upon pincers

and ginger-haired legs –

empty of actors,

this stage casually

bears a backdrop;

a skywash of sea,

a suggestion of birds,

how its scale frames

an old local story

with these barnacles

empty, ashen

as blown volcanoes.

ST. PETER AND THE STORM PETRELS

by  Ben Smith

Footsteps on water.

Dawn clear as prayer.

Bodies hanging over water

like small, dark beads.

How long have they been out there

treading slowly across the bay,

staring down into the salt-clear distances,

scrying for storms?

There was a time when a saint walked on water.

We saw him – a bright light crossing the bay

leaving a trail of taut, still water

marked with footprints.

He left long ago, turning west

on his weightless march,

leaning into the heft of the waves

like a restless ship.

We still wait for him to return,

but perhaps, lost or driven mad

by such winds, such distances,

this is what he has become –

a petrel hanging over water,

staring down as if in wonder

and pattering its ragged dance

to the distant, scudding footfall of storms.

HOLY WELL

by Isabel Galleymore

Legend tells that the well contained 3 fish,
and as long as St Neot ate no more than one
fish a day their number would never decrease.

Those seeking health, those whose
cells do not divide quickly enough,
visit this small installation of blessed
multiplications an angel once promised
– two fish will be three fish by the next
day, and always, as long as you only eat
one. There are no fish now – but where
there’s water there’s a whether of matter
– see how the coins someone’s placed in
the ripple are becoming uncertain of their
solid circles, copying their colour onto
the granite floor until this well fills with
thoughts of halos.

DERANGEMENTS OF SCALE

by Ben Smith

‘Environmental slogans follow horrifying predictions of climate chaos with injunctions, no less solemn, not to leave electrical appliances on standby or overfill the kettle. Such language enacts a bizarre derangement of scales, collapsing the trivial and the catastrophic into each other’

                                                                –   Timothy Clark

I boil the kettle and the crow is back at the window.

This has happened before. Maybe it has always happened.

I used to know a thing about birds – something

about feeding habits, something about patterns of flight –

but from here this crow looks the size of a tower block.

He walks the length of the horizon, staring at himself in the glass.

I boil the kettle and a tower block falls. It’s okay,

I knew that this would happen. There were signs

in the newspapers and pasted to lamp-posts.

But I didn’t know that the sky would fill with dust;

that the roof-tops, the window, the crow,

would all turn white with dust. I do not know

why the crow is collecting coat hangers, tangles of wire.

I boil the kettle and the TV loses itself in a storm. There is no news,

but if I listen at the wall I can hear talk of the weather –

that it will get much hotter, that it will get much colder.

I still have power, but across the street, lights disappear,

as if the crow is stretching his wings.

At night, the kettle switches on. I wake

to the sound of flood waters, of foundations murmuring.

I turn over. At least I don’t need to worry about the kettle any more.

Through the wall, in the kitchen and in kitchens across the city,

water pools in rows of untouched cups

and crows rise like heavy clouds of steam

lugging themselves towards open windows.

GIN & MORPHINE

by Paul Hyland

The vet came from a liquid lunch

to drench the bloated cow

with emulsion and morphine.

I stood firm, bracing myself

against the beast’s swollen belly

as the drunken man punctured it

with a cannula under the ribs.

The cow let a small bellow

leak from her throat, while

foul air pissed out steadily

filling the stall with stench

spiked by the vet’s breath.

We strained to keep the cow

upstanding, and us on our feet.

I think I slept and dreamt

myself hunched under a hot cloud

of cow, suffering evil weather

and waking intoxicated, aching,

to late sunlight in the yard,

the vet revving his Jaguar

the cow upright and deflated.

OTTER

by Mike Rose-Steel

EAGLE-OWL

by Mike Rose-Steel

What is the ‘what is’ of it all

in the marbled eye of an eagle-owl?

This eye, that turns a head that turns

a wing to catch a mouse, is

all vowel, a drawn-out empty fall

into the wind’s growl

and what it sees lags off what it learns

from the rustle in night-grass.

BARNACLE

by Isabel Galleymore

Once, Barnacle was a larva
passing through 5 instars.

This was his most creative period –
voicing his body differently

in response to the waters

that warmed or cooled.

Then Barnacle committed

to the underneath of Endeavour.

Barnacle is cemented
to this boat by his forehead:

a tiny writer hunched over a desk
in the corner of a squat ivory tower.

He travels the world without realising –

only sometimes his operculum doors

slide open and his feathery limbs

filter, select, draw the outside in.

Paul Hyland is an award-winning poet and travel writer who lives in Dorset. He has published travel writing, literary criticism and guides to writing poetry. His Art of the Impossible: New and Selected Poems was published in 2004 by Bloodaxe and collects together poems published since 1974.

Mike Rose-Steel is a PhD student exploring the inexpressible and the limits of language in poetry and philosophy. He is also a founding member of the poetry collective exEgesis, a group responsible for all manner of poetry ‘happenings’ in the South West.

Isabel Galleymore is a PhD student at the University of Exeter where she is researching the role of metaphor in ecopoetics and nature writing with the support of the AHRC. Her poems have featured in Poetry Review, Poetry London and other magazines.