A POCKETFUL OF CHALK
(ARACHNE PRESS)

This book is a love letter to the sweeping landscape Booker has taken to herself and made home. Every phrase is earned, every stanza and sentence finely honed, nothing is wasted in these poems and each image sings. She is certainly one of the best nature poets I have read recently with the earthiness of Ted Hughes and the wondrousness of Alice Oswald.
​LONDON GRIP (Louise Warren)
The countryside, gardens and sea of the south coast populate these vigorous poems, which range across subjects as diverse as the effect on livestock of flying drones, to an elderly father remembering Easter by tasting a chocolate bunny. Humour and wit are employed in different forms, from the literal use of toilet humour in ‘Call of Nature’, to an aunt who envies luscious Italian hair, whilst her own own hair is an “under-achieving barnet/ pumped uplike a Norfolk turkey.’ Booker also gives us the deep power of simple and eternal.
 
‘Mr McGregor’s Seedlings’ portrays a gardener who spreads love and respect of nature through his joy in gardening. In ‘Footprints’ a prehistoric mother makes deeper footprints when she carries her child on their journey than when she sets him down to rest. The fossilised footprints “walk through every mother -/a fierce, unflinching love that won’t rub out.  This collection has earned its place on my bookshelves for its wit and range of subject matter held together by a strong sense of place.
​THE ALCHEMY SPOON (Tamsin Hopkins)
The domestic ‘pocketful’ contrasts beautifully with the messy, life-sustaining chalk with which this collection brims: this is unashamedly poetry of place, of Beacon Hill and Beachy Head, of the coastline and cliffs and the wildlife they harbour. . .  Booker watches it all, taking in their look, feel and fragrance, and reflecting on how they touch her senses. “Their wily scent/has brought my kitchen to a standstill” she says of wild narcissi. . . . Claire Booker is primarily a story-teller, and her poetry demonstrates it, brimming with nature, love, family childhood, all suffused with sensual, telling metaphor, but always interwoven with a narrative, and characters that linger with the reader. . . . Clever, imaginative, joyous.
​THE JOURNAL (Melissa Todd)
Booker’s poetry is moving, ringing as it does absolutely true in its emotional universality. In A Pocketful of Chalk, light, sea and sky are always present, reminders of loss and sorrow while consoling and reaffirming.
​IN-WORDS (Irena Hill)
There is no doubt that Booker has an exception ability to write about nature and place. Her richly evocative language brings these places vividly alive. Yet A Pocketful of Chalk is not just a collection of nature poems. It contains more intimate, authentically honest poems about personal experiences.  In some of these, the natural world acts as a commentary on the action.
 
In The Invitation, Booker describes the last night of a relationship spent at a party in a grand house. The poem begins with ‘the meadowlands of Sussex laid out/ before us like a picnic on best linen.’ On arrival, she describes the gravel bruising her feet and the Jacobean chimneys “shifting shape with each angle.” This is a place of change, unpredictability. At the poem’s end, she rises early the morning after to watch “an ancient hornbeam, black with rooks, fling hieroglyphs into the sky.” Only afterwards she understood that “it was the last time/we would spent together wild/ and that, not wild enough, for a last time.”
 
There is an impressive originality in these poems, an inventiveness in the language and a freshness in the observations. So, if you’re looking for an Xmas present for a fellow poetry lover, look no further!
​NIGEL KENT POET BLOG (Nigel Kent)
What’s striking about this collection is the consistency of the voice, the sense of achieved self in the words and the landscapes, together with the quiet but definite sense of humour.
​Tom Vaughan
This little volume thrills with what poetry is really about – love, death, creativity all dressed in the lightest of fabrics which are discarded as the humanity beneath comes slowly to the surface. There is the question, basic to a poet, of creativity itself. A horse, for example, is ‘the pivot of creation’:
“Let there be life, I said
and life awoke
to my touch: a white horse . . .
 
I never tire of setting it free
into its wilderness
of lines and stippled paper.”
 
Again, keying into the poet’s most fundamental problems: “Inevitably words let us down.”
Things have a certainty that the word lacks: “I’m sick of weighing the word/ I want
a Marbled White to burn my eyes with its/ impossible exactness.” Is this not Blake’s ‘minute particulars’?
 
Booker uses metaphor brilliantly. For her “life grows/ slowly and magically, like the new baby/ on his way.” And, of course, there is love which itches its way through so many of these poems. “Love is under every stone, and in our quiet breathing”.
 
And there are, of course, the language of poetry: ‘the sea’s still beating out / thunderous footsteps; ‘a waft / of wild garlic’; ‘wind-herded squall’; ‘As light bleaches the stars away’; ‘A kestrel unpleats / in a patch of violet sky’; ‘Light filters the carousel of aimless leaves’; ‘The air-splitting resin of marigolds’. I could go on. Every page has a flock of these ‘beauties’.
 
This is an astonishing little volume full of compacted lyric masterpieces, profundities dressed in dissimulations which make you catch your breath as they are revealed. 15p a poem and a bargain!
THE HIGH WINDOW (David Pollard)
There’s more than a little strong emotion and fine perception among the poems which form Claire Booker’s third collection, A Pocketful of Chalk.
 
We learn of a deep connection with the sea from the moving poem Fisherman’s Daughter: “Dad was an artist with a needle – woosh, woosh it would go, like Sunday rain  . .  unhitching stories/ until the room started rocking like a beamer/ and I could smell the fish shoaling,/ feel their weight as they pulled against the trawl.”
 
These are mainly poems summoned by the occasions of her life: the death of a friend; an outing with a young fossil collector; country walks where she stumbles on one vision or another that strikes her as comic, ironic or, sometimes, surreal. Her tone varies from the joyously ribald to the deeply serious and there are sad poems about a failed relationship: “Now I see it was the last time/ we would spend together wild –/ and that, not wild enough for the last time”,(The Invitation).
 
There’s often vivid life in her language based on close observation. At best, she achieves unwavering clarity, tension and admirable economy of means: Footprints is about fossil footprints revealing evidence of a woman carrying a child: “No deviation, a gauntlet of danger,/ each step deepened by the weight of a child.// Twice, she put him down (we can tell). Was it to rest?
ARTEMIS (Dilys Wood)
Anchored within the landscapes of the South Downs, this collection washes in on a wave of energy . . . expands to juxtapose the natural world, the constellations and the human body with panache, skill and sometimes surprises.  Via language which is both rich and spare, the vastness of the time and space we inhabit is encountered: ‘Sand: Naming the Parts’ lists the sources of a dab of sand on a fingertip, “a skirl of atoms, a molecular dip-paddle/ into the condensed pandemonium of time.” 
 
Within the smaller scale of the human lifecourse, the speaker inspects a tiny dictionary in a vitrine (‘Museum of Childhood’). Her yearning to turn the page is obstructed by the ‘border crossing’ of the glass where she sees ‘my ageing face, stamped on its glass’. A Pocketful of Chalk offers many-layered poems which reward reading and re-reading, and we exit gently with the slow, sometimes unpredictable growth of vegetables and fruit, and of love.
​ORBIS (Jenny Hockey)
The natural world is holy and full of wonder, here, and the beauty, mythology and landscape of the South Downs are brought wonderfully to life, from fossils ‘tattooed in the strata’ to the ‘sun’s slow yolk’ and everything in between. The writing is fine, intelligently composed, entirely lacking in cliché. . . . I like these feminist contemplations a lot, but there’s much more here to enjoy, and these are just one interwoven element in A Pocketful of Chalk, which concludes with images of ‘beauty in the squander’ and love ‘under every stone. Magical and marvellous!
​BUZZ MAG (Mab Jones)
Booker digs deep beneath the surface to mine a rich vein of poetry . . .The lyrical drive of many poems in the collection comes from her love of English hymnody. Many of the poems are about nature, but there are others which explore relationships with family and friends. . . The violent heading in ‘News Flash’ haunts the narrator with endless repeats until the carefree girls playing on the beach become fully cognisant of the horror. The poem is the musical equivalent of the renegade snare drummer in Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony who is given the freedom to improvise to the point of waging a war with the full forces of the rest of the orchestra. . . . Whether Booker is writing about a father mending nets, an osprey fledging or Mirabelle plums, she dazzles us with her inventive vocabulary and keen observation. Highly recommended.
INK PANTRY (Neil Leadbeater)
In ‘Long Man Dreaming’ the narrator has parked in the car park nearby as the chalk giant dreams,
 
Fish will inherit the earth booms the giant
 
as he sluices against currents with his upright poles
transformed into oars. They slap, slap between drowning
steeples, tractors floating belly-up, corpses
 
swept along in huddled herds. A mackerel shoots
rainbows across the car bonnet. Lobsters have tethered
themselves to the Pay & Display.
 
Their bubbles scatter like petulant bullets.
I rummage for my parking coins, find flint stones.
Is it too late to buy a ticket?
 
It brought to mind Matthew Sweeney’s poem ‘Fishbones Dreaming’, not for the fish but for the idea of things returning to their source. Here the dreamt sea claims the land, showing nature could over-turn man’s grasp, as tractors are rendered useless, buildings are flooded and money is turned to stone. Is the narrator buying a ticket for her car, or to gain entry to the dream of man’s dominance being diminished?
 
A Pocketful of Chalk raises concerns for climate change and what could be lost. There are also very human concerns: motherhood, intergenerational relationships and grief. All approached with the vitality and empathy of a poet wishing to share her concerns and love for the topics covered.
​EMMA LEE1 (Emma Lee)
Claire Booker’s A Pocketful of Chalk is many things – not least a hymn to the Sussex Downs, to Brighton and to the natural world. However, it is her grasp of details – and their changing contexts – that sunk its hooks into me. The collection opens with the powerful, transformative ‘Looking Towards Smock Mill.’ Smock Mills lour over Brighton like sentinels and there’s a betwitching quality to Booker’s liminal landscape where “evening shadows make monsters of sheep./ Even a crow has its life stretched.” In this landscape, everything is transformed – even the speaker – as “The sun raises me up like a beanstalk.” . . . Remembering Chocolate’ packs a punch. Like ‘Looking Towards Smock Mill’, the poem wears its power lightly and deftly evokes time and place with the economy and power of D.H. Lawrence (think ‘Piano’.) The gloves are off and she writes with more nuance than we can comfortably bear.
​POOR RUDE LINES (John Field)
This is nature poetry at its best, interwoven with the subtle and moving evocation of intense moments in a life course: youthful and mature loves, a parent’s decline, mothering and not mothering . . .
Lyn Thomas
I emerged from Claire Booker’s A Pocketful of Chalk refreshed, as if from a journey across the downs and cliff-tops that she so clearly loves. This is a collection of remarkable honesty, breadth and depth, full of Booker’s insights into her own experience and her perceptions at precise moments, seasons and times.
 
‘Looking Towards Smock Mill’ is an ecstatic view of long, late afternoon shadows across the landscape as the narrator gazes across downland and identifies with “my sister the smock mill” and tangentially with the two-dimensional chalk Long Man: “I’m Stilt Woman, Giantess of the Hill./ If I turn, I’ll vanish.”
 
The Long Man has his own vision in ‘Long Man Dreaming’. Here the narrator is in the car park next to the ancient etched figure, when the landscape returns to its origins as a seabed. Her car takes part in the transformation:
 
“ . . . The leather seats are growing
back their bones. The walnut dashboard    sways    gives shade.”
 
A series of poems about memory and beloved people is introduced by ‘Bringing You Back’, a poem in memory of a friend. Inspired by a Buddhist bell that had been hers, the narrator sees a remembered image of her on a spit of land, “stooped in awe of shells I crushed/ without seeing.”
 
Memories of childhood and a ‘First Kiss’ follow, delicately evoked by a “landslip of sights . . . from the top of Folly Hill.” In ‘Remembering Chocolate’ a father is lost to dementia but restored to the narrator by his care for her gift, and then reinvented as a musical instrument in ‘Anniversary.’ In ‘The Fisherman’s Daughter’ the voice of a girl who “made a good catch”, but knows she is trapped, speaks:
 
“Once the little’uns arrived, I knew
there’d be no hole big enough to wriggle through.
Fish don’t know how to go backwards.
That’s how it works.”
 
Booker sees everything with a storyteller’s eye and writes in a poet’s rich metaphoric language. The poems in A Pocketful of Chalk are simultaneously personal, universal, mysterious and revealing. Anyone looking for a guide book of scenic walks in south-east England will be disappointed. This collection is very much more than that.
WRITE OUT LOUD (Janice Windle)
Claire Booker