Sussex-based poet and playwright Claire Booker has won four Poetry Society members competitions, the 2023 Stanza competition and been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. In 2019 she was guest poet at Dhaka’s International Writers Festival where she was the recipient of a Kathak literary award. Her previous poetry books include A Pocketful of Chalk (Arachne Press, 2022) and The Bone That Sang (Indigo Dreams, 2020).

Far from being pedestrian, this collection offers alternate versions of familiar story lines, explores ‘what if’ scenarios and is capable of being read on many different levels. Herein is a rich tapestry of words and images weaved by a poet who is sure of her craft. In short, Booker’s work keeps us on our toes. With every line, we never quite know what is coming round the corner and it is this element of surprise that gives this book its special appeal.

Her subject matter is wide-ranging and unpredictable. One moment we are listening to a Scriabin piano roll and the next we are in the Martyred Intellectuals Cemetery, Dhaka. For me, however, it is the nature poems that stand out the most. ‘Heartsease’ is one of those wonderful poems that moves from the specific to the universal. The way in which Booker achieves the transition is exemplary:

 

As we inspected a clump

of heartsease on the edge of a garden

 

a woman came out,

accused us of trespassing.

 

I walked away. You stayed to listen -

closely, patiently,  like a friend.

 

It’s loneliness, you said

that’s made her angry.

 

I looked back and saw you had left her

a little of yourself to hold.

 

In ‘Putting my father together again’ Booker portrays a moving picture of her father, “the master of repairs” at work restoring broken objects. “I imagine you lining up the metal rule, penciling / with your methodical touch. / Your spirit level – because the eye can be fooled.”

‘Birth Mother’ is another poem that caught my attention. It’s brevity is laudable. I particularly like the careful line breaks and the way the first and last couplets are set in opposition to each other:

 

     we tore

     apart

     …

     at my dead centre

     a knot

There is humour in ‘Trying not To Wake You’.  ‘Half Seas Over in Love’  positively sparkles with its “naked-in-the-quad-laughter” - a superb piece of writing whose lines come fresh off the page and sound so effortless despite everything that must have gone into their making. The poem titled ‘When I Swallow an Apple Pip I Think of You, Diane’ is another that is at once engaging and entertaining. Here are the opening and closing lines:

 

     I was a windsock for all your moods

     imitated your laid-back cynicism, drove it deep

     into my uncool heart

     ….

     How we planned to be dead at sixty,

     dead, cremated and infamous. 

 

The final poem ‘It’s Never Too Late for a Happy Childhood” contains some humorous lines as well as that sense of awe and excitement that all children feel about making a snowman: “Remember -  a snowman is not just for Christmas. / It will outlast drifts, but never your affection.”

Whether she is writing about Dido and Aeneas, rooks staging a passable re-enactment of Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows or observing the feral dogs of Moscow, Booker’s poems are always engaging, intelligent and accessible, and her subjects range across a wide spectrum of literature and experience.

Claire Booker, Pedestrian in the Multiverse, Waterloo Press, £12