Twenty Tides

“Having contracted pneumonia twice, I was immediately back in the liminal space of the ward that Claire Booker conjures in this fine collection. Doctors, nurses and patients swim in and out of view. But for all the watery imagery, Booker’s poems are remarkable for their control and precision, and it is this duality that gives them such power. Underlying the paradox of being confined in one place for ten days is a sense of great movement and shifts in perspective. Memories of Booker’s mother add a tender current, and create new understandings and empathies, acknowledging the truth of her poem ‘We little paper boats’, ‘with our cargo of life / spinning in the maelstrom, / steered by the brave’. Tenderness, humour, compassion and survival all swim in this gorgeous aquarium.” Lisa Kelly

“If the role of poetry is to show us what it is to be intensely alive, Claire Booker’s Twenty Tides is the survivor’s guide. She leads us with courage, candour and humour through her treatment for pneumonia into recovery, where she is visited in dream or hallucination by her mother in various guises: from comforting presence to a terrifying apparition who ‘holds me as a mirror, / her hurt written in its mist’. This dreamscape is balanced with deep empathy for the real patients, like glamorous Giselle who demands duck-blue socks instead of the ‘kek-brown’ standard issue because ‘Femininity is her superpower, her weapon against death’. Booker ends with characteristic optimism, ‘no longer a pearl diver / suspended in a paucity of gases’, as she moves towards the exit through ‘an ebb tide of undiscovered bays / its littoral of lives laid bare’.” Mark Fiddes

Twenty Tides is very elemental and very pithy.

ISBN: 978-1-0682701-5-4               

36 pages

R.R.P. £7.50

A sample poem can be enjoyed below.

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Twenty Tides (with p&p options)

Twenty Tides (with p&p for UK only delivery) £9.49 GBP Twenty Tides (with p&p for non-EU Rest of World delivery) £23.50 GBP

 

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In this tangled forest

my alveoli are wood anemones
crushed by fallen branches 
I must suck and expel 
nine hundred times an hour –
a tense negotiation of deep invisibles

these bed sheets, this utter 
helplessness

my mother appears to flicker beside me 
somnolent light
warmth at my temples, shock 
of eau de Cologne

she bundles me downstream 
to the watercress beds of childhood –
quick brown trout, motionless 
against currents

we whirlpool towards Bosham
where Knut’s young daughter is drowning 
among black-headed gulls and yearling swans
her lungs fill with tide, release 
their spritz of bubbles