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Beyond the Gate is rooted in a woman's right to walk through streets and forests, through her own story. Clare Best plays compelling, original games with form. Her voice is fired by precision and observation, seared with a questioning wit. - Robert Hamberger;Shifting between the intimacy of the domestic space and a deep connection with the natural world, Best shows us beauty laced with danger, darkness, flashes of fear.This exploration of love and loss considers how we hold and carry our memories, how far ahead we dare to look. - Rebecca Goss;Clare Best writes with scruple and clarity, listening always for the unsaid and the unsayable, watching for the passage of flame into darkness. - Michael Hulse

Clare Best's first full poetry collection, Excisions (Waterloo 2011), was a finalist for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, 2012. Her second, Each Other (Waterloo 2019), was described in London Grip as 'brimming with ideas, thinking, experiments with form, and intrigue'. Other poetry publications include Treasure Ground, Breastless, CELL and End of Season. Clare has held residenciesatWoodlandsOrganicFarminLincolnshire, the University of Brighton and HMP Shepton Mallet. She thrives on collaborating with visual artists and with musicians and composers. Springlines, a project with the painter Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis, explores hidden and mysterious bodies of water across the South of England. Clare has co-created three chamber operas and a song cycle, and was a Fellow at Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2021. Her prose memoir The Missing List (Linen Press 2018) - written during the last illness of the father who abused her as a child - was a finalist in the Mslexia Memoir Competition 2015.Andrew O'Hagan wrote of this work, 'a tapestry of time - brightly coloured, beautifully orchestrated, emotionally pure.' The Missing List was cited by Dr Irene Gammel of Ryerson University,Toronto, as 'an important, essential text in the context of the #MeToo movement.' Clare lives near the Suffolk coast. clarebest.co.uk

Contents Woods, Chalk, Glass A heron in a poem might seem a cliche 5 Lark walk, February 6 Watering hole 7 Clem, at six, 8 Googling < long-tailed tit > in November 9 Still life with lemon 10 Browsing at my desk, May 2020 12 In Markstakes Wood 13 beyond the gate 14 By Night At WH Smith, Brighton Station 19 The pools at Glyndebourne 20 Once my home 22 Using Greenwood's Large-Scale Map of the County of Suffolk (1825) to find my friend's house 23 Portent 24 Hard hat 25 Rising in the night, in summer 26 My son's first leather boots 27 St Lucy's Day, 4.15 pm 28 Last thing 29 Cinder Path Salting 33 After your procedure 38 On this day 39 What do we know? 40 The words 41 By Water Three poems about fog 45 In the well-house, December 46 Book of water 47 Dewpond 48 Cart pond 49 Geological section 50 salt works 51 Field notes, Horsmonden furnace pond 52 Water spirit 54 Lecanomancy 56 Flight Path Return to Lago Maggiore, March 2022 59 Of seasons 60 T-Junction 61 A14 62 It was always my head 63 Burning 64 Late fig 66 I'm writing 67 Self-portrait as boundary oak 68 My possible deaths 69 Flowers, 70 Wake 71 Crossing the Styx in the Quiet Carriage 72 Epitaph 73