Clare Best, poet, teacher and friend of the Faculty of Arts reads from her new collection Excisions.
15 Aug 2013
A live poetry event on 4 October 2011 brings acclaimed poet Clare Best once again to the University of Brighton. Among the most popular of our teachers of creative writing, Clare has given workshops here for many years both to undergraduates on our Literature programmes and on the creative writing short courses run from the Work Write Live initiative.
Clare Best's new publication Excisions (Waterloo Press, 2011) is her first book-length collection and the launch this month coincides with a live event hosted by the Brighton and Sussex Medical School.
Excisions resounds with universal themes of love and passion, inheritance and physicality, loss and adaptation. The first section, Matryoshka, concerns the interplay between grief and memory, while the third, Airborne, maps the changing landscapes of desire. The central sequence, Self-portrait without Breasts, is inspired by the poet’s own journey through preventive double mastectomy. Clare Best describes on her website www.clarebest.co.uk:
"When I reached my late 40s, the age at which my mother first had the disease, doctors told me I too had a high risk of breast cancer. I chose preventative bilateral mastectomy, without reconstruction. I also chose not to disguise my new flat chest.
Throughout the months of decision-making, surgery and recovery, I wrote a journal. I made plaster casts of my body. Laura Stevens took ‘before and after’ photos. Gradually, what had begun as my way of coping, evolved into a major creative project."
Clare's performance of Self-portrait without Breasts will happen alongside a remarkable display of photographs of the poet by Laura Stevens, a young Brighton photographer and graduate of our MA Photography at University of Brighton.
Michael Hulse reviews: "Clare Best writes of the things of the world, and of the moments in our lives, as if they bear within them secrets of mortality that words will never quite have the power to reveal. She writes with scruple and clarity, listening always for the unsaid and the unsayable, watching for the passage of flame into darkness."
For Jackie Wills Clare Best's work is: "Unpredicatable, erotic and philosophically demanding"
Clare Best performs poems from her sequence exploring preventative double mastectomy
Display of photographs by Laura Stevens
Followed by a discussion with Dr James Mackay MA, MD, FRCP, FRCPE Consultant Clinical Genetic Oncologist
Tuesday 4 October 2011
Reception at 6:30 for performance at 7:30
Brighton and Sussex Medical School
Chowen Lecture Theatre, Medical School Teaching Building
Brighton BN1 9PX
Three turns in the corridor
to the anaesthetic room, one last walk
with breasts, the weight of them
familiar as my own name and address.
A young man in a white coat small-talks
London, fixes a cannula into the wrist
where my watch has been. My lips
keep moving––explain we left
some years ago, not the stress,
more the desire to raise our child
on chalk hills, near the sea.
His eyes clear as a newborn’s
close to my face, he holds my hand––
a moment of love, I will call it that.
I lend him this life, veins freezing
from the forearm up.
Clare Best, Excisions, is available from Waterloo Press www.waterloopress.co.uk priced £10
