Nine Arches Press
Adventures in poetry
The Field in Winter
David Clarke
ISBN: 978-1-913437-76-3
eISBN: 978-1-913437-77-0
Price: £10.99
Publication date: 7th September 2023
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Field in Winter, the third collection of poetry by David Clarke, winner of the Michael Marks Award, elegantly reflects on memory, time, and the very particular landscape of grieving.
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Praise for The Field in Winter:
"The Field in Winter is a gloriously observant and richly thoughtful collection.David Clarke confirms the promise of his earlier collections with poems that are at once grounded in the readily observed and full of rich, quiet, thoughtful leaps of imagination. Few poets have his eye for the meaning of things, and fewer still his ear for a perfectly balanced line. Most importantly, this is poetry as lived experience, informed by a deep knowledge of the craft.” -Jonathan Davidson
"Anyone who feels uncertain whether they will enjoy modern poetry should try David Clarke’s new book. Accessible, yet never facile, The Field in Winter has its eye on the big questions, but also represents a certain kind of tight-focused lyrical Englishness. In fact the book opens in Poland and returns there several times – often in sonnets, a form he is constantly shadowing. Clarke’s formal authority is everywhere on display, and as in his 2019 collection, The Europeans (Nine Arches), the tone is genial, companionable. But there are complex layers to these poems and a distinctive underlying rumble – even when he is not describing Storm Ellen, which he does superbly. Clarke is above all a pastoral poet, a close and sometimes elegiac observer, whose sketch-book is full of fresh and engaging miniatures (starlings make “sci-fi sounds/of lasers deep in space”, a stork is “pacing the fields with a surgeon’s tact”). Drawn particularly to named places in the British Isles, he is attuned to the tensions between city life and country matters, finding poetry where we might not expect it: “I almost forgot to mention the bark of a cherry/ in the halogen light of that new streetlamp”. If David Clarke has a daemon, it must be that “Urban Fox” he describes, who stops beneath a streetlight, then “turns her head to hear/the call of a greater life”. - John Greening
David Clarke's first pamphlet,Gaud, won the Michael Marks award in 2013. His first collection, Arc, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2015 and was longlisted for the Polari Prize. Another pamphlet,Scare Stories, was published by V Press in 2017 and was named a Poetry School ‘Book the Year.’ His second collection,The Europeans, was published by Nine Arches in 2019. His poems have appeared in publications including Magma,Poetry Wales andThe Guardian.
Photograph credit: Helen Dewbery
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David Clarke's second collection,The Europeans, is both close to home and also outward looking, to beyond these shores. These wry and perceptive poems revel with form and encompass journeys, ideas of nationhood and national identity, and the optimism of a time when Europe and the UK enjoyed a quite different 'entente cordiale'. They are a warning against nostalgia, a lucid and prescient exploration of how we see ourselves and how we are seen.
Find out more about The Europeans
The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.
