Clare Best performs three poems from her sequence 'Self-portrait without Breasts'. The performance at Brighton & Sussex Medical School marked the launch of Breastless - a pamphlet from Pighog Press featuring a number of the poems as well as an essay by cancer consultant Gareth Evans, a memoir by Clare and photographs by Laura Stevens.

With a strong family history of breast cancer, Clare decided to have preventive surgery. But going against fashion, she chose not to have reconstructive surgery - or implants.

Through her decisions and her poetry, Clare is helping to open up discussions around options for women in similar situations.

Breastless from Terrier TV on Vimeo.

Blogger Andy Brown was recently moved to express his admiration for the poetry of Clare Best in a piece which sums up the brilliance of her sequence "Self Portrait without Breasts":

"Today I’ve been reading EXCISIONS by Clare Best (Waterloo Press, 2011). I’d already read Clare’s chapbook Treasure Ground some time ago, and admired its careful attention to observed detail; its attentiveness to landscape and stewardship (it came out of a writer’s residency on an organic farm), and its equally careful attention to phrasing, poetic devices and a great way with imagery. But EXCISIONS is an altogether more extraordinary book of poems, wholeheartedly recommended... 

"The second group, "Self-Portrait Without Breasts", is truly remarkable. As a teenager in the 1970s, Clare had nursed her mother through the trauma of two radical mastectomies. Her aunt and first cousin both developed breast cancer in subsequent decades. Following all of this, she was told that she also had a high risk of breast cancer herself and so chose preventative bilateral mastectomy. This radical reformulating of her mature body has not only reshaped her life, but resulted in a body of poems that equally shows radical poetic reformulations that are more than equal to handling this mind-boggling subject matter. As she writes ‘I have an ear for truth’ and that is unquestionably so. I don’t want to ‘excise’ bits of it myself, so will just say “read it”. This is precise, inventive, often witty and sometimes erotic, and at all times powerfully truthful writing – I don’t think any other group of poems has made me feel so aware of my body. There’s not a shred of sentiment or maudlin self-indulgence here: this is the real thing. Formally it is varied and rich, assured in its handling of music and image, and conclusively powerful in tone, range and subject matter."

A selection from "Self-Portrait Without Breasts" appears in Pighog's Breastless.

Live poetry in London 2010

Live poetry in London 2010

Poetry reading in London - September 2010

Poetry reading in London - September 2010

Poetry reading in London - September 2010

Sarah Jackson from Terrier TV on Vimeo.

Charlotte Gann is the author of the mysterious and richly rewarding poetry pamphlet The Long Woman. In this exclusive interview with Pighog's Assistant Editor Tom Slingsby, the poet sheds light on her creative processes and the ferment of influences and experiences which make her work so fascinating.

TS: One of my favourite things about The Long Woman is the way each poem offers a glimpse into a richly imagined world, almost as though each piece were a snapshot of a novel. Was narrative a big consideration when you were writing these poems?

CG: I love this question – and way of seeing the sequence. Thank you, Tom. Yes, narrative was extremely important to me when writing these poems, and there are complex characters, stories – constructions – behind each one. I like the way you've described it here too, because you capture something of the compression of material within each poem. For me, it's this which anchors them despite the emotional nature of much of their subject matter.

I read that Philip Larkin said: 'poetry begins with emotion in the poet, ends with the same emotion in the reader, and the poem is the instrument which put it there.' I'd go along with this – and, for me, having a narrative can help me achieve this cleanly. A narrative brings with it an inherent immediacy, and sense of movement – both of which can carry a weight of emotion. Likewise for suspense, mystery, revelation – all inherent characteristics of a narrative framework.

I am a big film-lover, and often feel as though I'm holding a camera, choosing an angle, creating a scene. I like the space this lets into the work, which again helps me keep cool, and able to think. It's a combination that works for me – and I think this detachment also helps enormously when it comes to the editing process.

TS: Do you write to process things you already know, or do you write to be surprised – or a combination of the two?

CG: Definitely both. There are certainly some systems of thought which draw me – I am easily convinced, for instance, by a psychological paradigm. But the work would feel lifeless to me if the process – and my processing – wasn't still very actively ongoing. The emotion has to be alive and real for me – that's the bit that is very much 'in the moment'. At the same time, my discipline is to bring to this material a capacity to think, feel compassion, show understanding and share humour. I want the emotion to retain its rawness, but be 'held', if you like, in a solid and mature thought-about container – again, a narrative can provide this. 'Molecular Biologist', incidentally, is a poem that suggests we all find our own ways to process and package experience.

TS: Can you tell us a bit about the influences and interests that led you to start writing poetry? I believe your MA at Sussex University was an important part of the story.

CG: The MA was certainly very important, although it served really as a continuation of a process I had already started. Originally, I studied English at UCL. Reading and writing were always passions. An interest in psychology and personal development came later.

In my mid-30s I stopped working as an editor to be at home with my two young sons. It was then I suddenly found myself writing with a whole new impetus. In the past, I had always tried to write fiction – novels – and this had been an uphill struggle. Suddenly I was only interested in writing poetry. I think it's because I had realised that this parcelling of emotion, insight – this framing of vignettes, if you like – was what it was all about for me. I was excited by the idea of writing different kinds of poems – my own sort – which, exactly as you've described, set out to capture something of the emotional drama and weight of a whole narrative, and then pack it into the small parcel of a poem.

My MA, then, which was on Creative Writing and Personal Development, just absolutely mirrored my own burgeoning interests, providing a wonderful framework for me to continue to develop my own thoughts, and indeed writing processes.

TS: The poems in this collection reveal a dark and mysterious side to family life. Are these representations influenced by your own family at all?

CG: Certainly there are some reflections of my own experience of growing up in a large family in the 1970s. My father, for instance – who was an eccentric, very English man, and who died more than twenty years ago – crops up more than once in this collection. However, I think my work is equally influenced by the whole mesh of other families around me, the communities I've lived in, all the experiences I've had, the stories I've heard, books I've read et cetera, et cetera. I think, like everyone, I compress a multitude of thoughts, impressions, momentary insights, to create this other 'felt' world that I then choose to conjure up in poetry.

This is one of the reasons I like being the age I now am – 46. I feel every day brings new experience that adds to the stock – yet, perhaps ironically, also reinforces my commitment to the fact that there are only a limited number of themes that really compel me – the ones which have done so all along. And with each passing decade, courage in my own convictions grows.

TS: The Long Woman conjures vivid mental pictures of the Sussex landscape, pictures that are both immediately recognisable and at times strange. Can you tell us a bit about how Sussex permeates your work?

CG: Permeates is a good word for it. The Sussex landscape permeates my work because it permeates me – presumably because it surrounded me in my formative years. I grew up, and live again now, in Lewes, which is a town geographically couched in the chalk Downs: they literally framed my view – and so, organically, form part of it. That's how it feels anyway.

The old ruined village of Tide Mills is the setting for my poem 'Pocket'. Tide Mills is a place I visited a lot as a child, then didn’t for a long time, and now return to with children of my own. When there, I can almost literally see past and present traced on top of each other – all this in the soothing levelling presence of the sea. The Long Woman closes on this relatively neat and redemptive note, although 'Pocket' is deliberately not quite snug enough to stop at 14 lines.

TS: What particular trait do you most admire in other writers?

CG: I remember on the MA reading Marion Milner on Picasso. She wrote: ‘here was someone with the courage to recognise and admit such inner chaos’. I think I have always admired writers, artists, indeed people, who are willing to do this. One hero is Patrick Hamilton, who wrote a lot about London and Brighton. His characters are invariably vulnerable and  flawed – a combination that always interests me. So, George Harvey Bone in Hangover Square, hopelessly and unrequitedly in love; Miss Roach in Slaves of Solitude learning the folly of her even daring to dream of love.

I also value poets, like Selima Hill, who tell stories which make me feel less alone, and more able to accept the energies bubbling away under the surface. Two other touchstone poems have been 'Wild Geese' by Mary Oliver, and the legendary 'Not Waving But Drowning' by Stevie Smith. Both more than satisfy the ultimate aim I have for my own work: to frame a narrative quite tightly in a way that's both compassionate and telling. I also love reading T.S. Eliot – the cool intelligent part of writing poetry is immensely precious to me.

There are, of course, more poets, novelists, musicians, artists, film makers and people who have influenced me over the years, and do moment to moment, than I could possibly name here – the subtlety of the impact things have on us is, in itself, a key subject for me.

Ciaran O'Driscoll reading poetry in the Burren.

Declan Ryan reading 'The Square and Compass' at the Pighog Press London Series - September 2010

'Tom Cunliffe’s Suit of Lights contains poetry and prose passages. The latter are not quite prose poems, since they contain narrative and anecdote in the manner of prose. However, similar to his poetry they are concise and evocative as in Footsteps ‘…at night this table searches for those souls loosened by the rain. I see you fall across it motionless, with all the silence of a Perugino. Four legs are not enough’. Particularly powerful are poems about extinct animals, with poignant footnotes: ‘across her lawn/ to a cave/ and steps / / torch beams / touch a stallion / running point to a herd…’ to ‘…stampeding off cliffs / she hears them leap / voiceless’, footnote – Tarpan. European wild Horse. Extinct. C 1800 (from Tarpan).

The beauty and loss of other animals includes the Japanese Wolf and the Rufous Gazelle, extinct as recently as 1930. Off-beat images and anarchic situations, blackly humorous, such as the character who ties her lover to a door jamb and after leaving the scene is unable to remember whether she flicked the switch on or off when she placed a light bulb in his mouth, inhabit many poems. The style is sometimes flowing, sometimes staccato, the mixture of down-to-earth and surreal creating juxtapositions that can surprise with particular humour and vividness. My father lies (from ‘rest’) has the device of a son hiding in the rafters ‘along with the cuckoo and the wrens’ watching his parents’ slightly saucy activities. ‘She wears her air-hostess uniform with black silk stockings / and has just wiped his brow with good fortune’.' Stella Stocker, Weyfarers, No. 107, Guildford Poet’s Press, February 2010

Poetry reading in London - September 2010

‘The creatures that clamber into the pages of James Brookes’ debut are unwitting players in his constitution of a country. In a collection that stalks across England from Horsham to Whitby, down the Tees-Exe line, and up to Clitheroe’s “slick hauberk of rain and [...] Lancs postcode”, his animals are drafted in to act as additional signposts. While the quintessential Englishness of thrushes, badgers and a “roving dog / with a stick in his mouth/ loose on the fields” leaves us in no doubt as to where we are, however, Brookes also employs it to draw our attention to other, less picturesque aspects of the land: the sense of embattlement; the awareness of the enemy at the gate. The badger becomes not a symbol of the countryside but a ragged fifth-columnist, shunting for “tubercular lebensraum”, “tilting its panzerfaust snout”. In poems spiky with nouns and rat-tatting with alliteration, Brookes paints a portrait of a country that is beautiful and seething, from “its doggers’ fissures, its Jermyn blight / [...] to [...] the sleek hips of the Downs”.’

Poetry Review: Volume 100: 3 Autumn 2010

Poetry reading in London - September 2010

There are plenty of books and pamphlets to dig through and gems aplenty. One such is James Brookes'
The English Sweats. This 36 page pamphlet debut is a well-crafted exploration of Englishness and belonging
that has a grasp of history and place in modulated poems that delight and surprise with their playfulness.

He draws upon narratives and references from his family history and other historical incidents of rupture
from Roman Britain through Medieval Sussex to the Second World War that lead back to a place,
predominantly Sussex.

His word selection and delineation clearly echo the scars of violence and resistances to produce a rough
music, albeit knowingly ‘snug in the trim of privilege’. Overall the collection has great coherence and a
compelling and lively lyricism.

Review by David Caddy from Tears in the Fence, Issue 52, p. 168.

Live poetry in London 2010

No sign of Professor Brian Cox but otherwise this was a stellar gathering in
response to and to conclude Matthew Luck Galpin's exhibition 'Anvilled Stars'
at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, England. The exhibition
presented five of Galpin's mirrors wrought from meteorites, displaced around
the musuem's gallery. Introduced by artist Rebecca Slingsby, seven performers
presented their response to the work: Nancy Campbell, Brian Catling, Jack
Catling, John Davies (aka Shedman), D. Gwalia, MacGillivray and Holly Slingsby.

The booklet Campo del Cielo is available now in our online bookshop.

Terrier TV were on hand to record the event for posterity and present the
highlights here.

Live poetry in London 2010

Live poetry in London 2010

Moss Rich's video introduction to the 2011 Moss Rich Poetry Prize-giving, which took
place at the Foundry in Lewes, East Sussex on Friday 11 March 2011. Click here to find
out who won!

Charlotte Gann - Tinderbox from Terrier TV on Vimeo.

Pighog are to be congratulated on bringing out the remarkable collection
I'll Be Back Before You Know It by Polish poet, Maria Jastrzebska. Poems
about her mother’s death co-exist with a picture of modern Poland and stark
images of the dereliction of the Second World War. The prose poems are of
equal power as in My Beloved’s Shoes, ‘…Covets them like orchids. She says
they make her tall, she says they’re shiny. She takes them out to look at. Holds
them close, cradling them in her arms like doves…’ More chilling is the title
poem I’ll Be Back Before You Know It. This is a wartime train and we know he
will not come back. ‘I thought the month of February would never end. No stars,
no clarity. Just wind pushing the clouds and trees and fences…Waking up I’d
imagine his train pulling out of Warsaw nearly half a century ago…Sygmunt
was there as well, both of them pretending it was just a business trip. I tried to
imagine the expression on my father’s face as he gazed out through the train
window…’ Now her mother has died she recalls ‘you said you wanted to hang on
to everything, even that spare pair of brown, suede gloves you keep in the car.’
This is horror described in an understated manner, recalling all the attempts to
avoid those close being hurt by facing what was really happening.

Contrasting is the beautiful, lyrical and witty News from Pulawska; ‘Spring’s so
late: / the storks flew in last week. / Snows have melted too fast: / trees stand
knee-deep in floods’. It continues to the overall scene, suggesting the change
from Communism to Catholicism, ‘Political jokes are back: / Radio Maryla blaring
out / to the mohair beret brigade, so loud / even the Vatican was embarrassed. /
The air smells of mud. / You can hear hymns playing.’ The sense of place, the feeling
for nature and atmosphere are vivid and accomplished and the ability to create
varieties of tone in the same poem, ending ‘If summer ever comes / ours will still
be the sweetest’. This exceptional collection is both enjoyable, with a sense of
enchantment in much of the work and hard-hitting in its quiet power.

From Weyfarers No. 109, December 2010.

Poetry reading in London - September 2010

Matthew Luck Galpin polishing a worked meteorite from Terrier TV on Vimeo.

Poetry reading in London - September 2010 from Terrier TV on Vimeo.

Poetry reading in London - September 2010 from Terrier TV on Vimeo.

With the deadline fast approaching, Pighog poet John O'Donoghue answers
some frequently asked questions about the Moss Rich Poetry Prize.

1 How long should my poem be?
The Prize rules state that the poem must not exceed 30 lines. There are a
number of approaches you could take within this line count. You could write
a formal poem such a sonnet. A sonnet is usually 14 lines - so you could
submit a sonnet and be well within the line count. There are other formal
poems, some with fixed line counts like villanelles, kyrielles, and triolets;
some with devices such as repetition like pantoums but no fixed lines counts,
and some where there are fixed rhyme schemes but again no fixed line counts
like ballads. All of these may be approaches to explore. You can also write
poems in blank verse, such as Shakespeare's character's speak in his plays,
free verse. You might want to invent a persona, a character who speaks a
monologue. Robert Browning used this device in a lot of his poems - you might
want to look at some of his work before you start. Living poets who have also
used personae include Linto Kwesi Johnson - see 'Sonny's Letter'; Carol Ann
Duffy; and Wendy Cope. Perhaps the idea of a persona doesn't appeal but free
verse does. How do you want your poem to look on the page? Do you want to
try the poem in tercets - three line stanzas; in free verse stanzas with a regular
number of lines each; as one block of text: as stanzas with an irregular number
of lines? All may be effective - in the end it's up to you and where your poem
takes you.

2 I'm a new poet entering my first competition. How can I make sure my poem
will have the best chance of success?
Look at the submission guidelines. Make sure your poem is laid out as these
guidelines require. Use good quality paper, and make sure you post your poem(s)
in an A4 envelope - a crease in the paper you've printed your poem on that goes
through a crucial line can spoil the presentation of a poem. Then make sure you've
written the best possible poem you can. Don't think that your first draft either is
necessarily the best version of your poem. Whenever I've written a poem I always
think it's wonderful. A few days later, when the first flush of pleasure has worn off,
I read the poem with a colder eye. It's then that I get a truer sense of the poem
and any flaws it may have. So try to draft and redraft your poem.

Read it out loud - does it sound OK or are there parts where it's awkward to say,
where you've inadvertently repeated words close together, or where it sounds
like a tonguetwister, or is a little over the top? Poems I think have to appear perfect,
as if they were conceived as naturally as speech; but this often only comes through
redrafting and revision and you would be well advised to test your poem to destruction
before entering it in the competition.

3 Does my poem have to rhyme?
No!

4 My Prize poem has to be written on the theme 'Root and Branch'. Are there any
guidelines about how to interpret the theme? 
Root and Branch can be taken a variety of ways. The theme is suggestive of the natural
world, where roots and branches evoke the forest, woodland, trees. Perhaps ecology
and green politics is your thing - what about a poem along these lines? Or what about
that other kind of tree, a family tree? Families all have roots - and families have branches
as well. What about something along these lines? Or what about the phrase in its broader
political sense - at the moment we seem to be undergoing 'root and branch reform' - maybe
you have something to say on that? As long as you clearly explore the theme in a creative
and poetic way you will be on the right track.

5 Are the judges looking for a particular kind of poem? 
The judges are just looking for the best poems entered for the competition. They are an
open-minded and diverse bunch, who in their own work have taken a wide variety of
approaches to writing poems. They just want to see the poems that stand out, that do
 different, that perhaps show an awareness of craft and skill, but also freshness and a
sense of the vivid.

6 I'm a performance poet and I'm worried my work won't be given the same
treatment as a poet of the page.
If your poem works out loud for audiences, chances are it will work on the page. But
make sure that you check the way it works on the page. Performance can rely on vocal
delivery and you'll need to make sure your poem delivers off the page too. The judges
are seeking excellent poems of any type and there is no prejudice against performance
poetry.

7 Can I use a poem I've already written that I think matches the theme?
Yes!

8 I write lots of songs - can I enter one as a poem?
Yes!

Read a profile of John O'Donoghue here
Read all about the prize here

Charlotte Gann - Black Drops from Terrier TV on Vimeo.

Tim Beech - La Pastorela from Terrier TV on Vimeo.

Brendan Cleary - The Hostages from Terrier TV on Vimeo.

‘The creatures that clamber into the pages of James Brookes’ debut are unwitting players
in his constitution of a country. In a collection that stalks across England from Horsham
to Whitby, down the Tees-Exe line, and up to Clitheroe’s “slick hauberk of rain and [...]
Lancs postcode”, his animals are drafted in to act as additional signposts. While the
quintessential Englishness of thrushes, badgers and a “roving dog / with a stick in his
mouth / loose on the fields” leaves us in no doubt as to where we are, however, Brookes
also employs it to draw our attention to other, less picturesque aspects of the land: the
sense of embattlement; the awareness of the enemy at the gate. The badger becomes not
a symbol of the countryside but a ragged fifth-columnist, shunting for “tubercular
lebensraum”, “tilting its panzerfaust snout”. In poems spiky with nouns and rat-tatting
with alliteration, Brookes paints a portrait of a country that is beautiful and seething,
from “its doggers’ fissures, its Jermyn blight / [...] to [...] the sleek hips of the Downs”.’

From Poetry Review, Volume 100: 3 Autumn 2010.

Lorna Thorpe - Lower Market Street, 1973 from Terrier TV on Vimeo.