John O’Donoghue

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Beyond the Gate, Clare Best, (Worple Press, 2023), 88 pages, £12

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Beyond the Gate is a collection which comprises a poetic fusion of the natural world and those tragic moments that can mark a life. At the heart of the collection is a sequence in the middle of five sequences that recalls loss, the very personal loss occasioned by a termination of pregnancy due to foetal abnormalities.

The five parts of the book, headed ‘Woods, Chalk, Glass’, ‘By Night’, ‘Cinder Path’, ‘By Water’, and ‘Flight Path’ recall the five movements of a symphony, or perhaps more the symphony’s more sotto voce musical cousin, the five movement string quartet. Like the string quartet, motifs weave intricately in and out of the collection, playing against one another in striking and harmonious ways to give an overall effect not of tragedy but of acceptance and an accommodation of painful personal experience.

Another motif subtly woven through these poems is that of doubles and doubling. This motif is first seen in ‘Watering hole’: ‘A parched morning. Two young fallow / step out of the woods, quick with fear…’. The poem ends with a moment of hallucination or perhaps vision: ‘Did I see that third deer / or was it my wanting?’ The two fallow – loaded word – deer have come to a dried-up watering hole; they evoke thoughts of ‘dehydration, death’ in the poet. The third deer – the imagined deer? – ‘all ease and vigour’ leaping over the bracken by the watering hole – ‘hope, necessity’. Here is the deer as the traditional poetic symbol of regeneration and growth, but also something more, a heraldic embodiment of poetry itself, a thought-deer, and it is this vision of poetry that sustains Best as the collection progresses.

Other doubles also populate the collection – two tracks and two white squirrels in ‘In Marstakes Wood’; two great-uncles who came to tragic ends in ‘Of seasons’; doubled registers and even layouts in ‘After your procedure’ and ‘The words’. This doubling evokes, I think, the bond between mother and child, and the solace the natural world can provide in ‘Salting’.

This quietly magnificent poem blends imagery from nature:

all through the long wet spring
the river    turns away
into bracken    sodden peat
sunlight skimming the surface

with a different lexical world:

no warning was given
that there would be
so much blood

that it would ooze
day after day
from a wounded core

Best places her lines about a walk by a river on the right-hand margin, her lines about her termination and its after-effects on the left-hand margin. The whole five-page poem is at once deeply moving and, coming as it were in the third movement of these deftly composed sequences, all flows into and out of its five pages (an echo of the collection’s five movements?): the natural world, the mother-child bond, doubles and doubling. The effect is almost like a fugue, a delicate, filigree fugue which at the same time sounds the most profound notes.

It is difficult to quote from ‘Salting’ in a short review, as it is so expertly put together; I recommend the reader seek it out for themselves for the full effect of this poem, and then to see how Best locates it with the rest of the poems in Beyond the Gate. With this book Best reaches a level of poetic achievement that places her amongst the first rank of poets at work in the English language.

Lest I give the impression that this is a sombre collection, there is also humour here, as for instance in ‘My possible deaths’, a poem in the last sequence in Beyond the Gate. Here Best welcomes to her door all the deaths that lie around the corner, and treats mortality with an insouciance that – after all that has preceded this poem – is hard won, and testimony to an underlying serenity.

Best may be well acquainted with sorrow – she has written in a previous collection, Excisions, of her risk-reducing double mastectomy and in her memoir The Missing List of the childhood sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of her father – but she has not allowed sorrow to define her, and in this collection it is the distinguished achievement provided by her work rather than painful personal experience that characterises the book.

I hope Beyond the Gate gets every plaudit which is its due.
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Image credit: Freddie Willatt

John O’Donoghue is the author of Brunch Poems (Waterloo Press, 2009) and Fools & Mad (Waterloo Press, 2014); Sectioned: A Life Interrupted (John Murray 2009); and the short story collections, The King From Over The Water (The Wild Geese Press, 2019), and The Servants and Other Strange Stories (Tartarus Press, 2024). Sectioned was awarded Mind Book of the Year 2010. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa and lives in Brighton.