Canterbury Poets - Clive Baker

Clive Baker

Biography: I have spent my life running away from things all over the world. I wasted time in Singapore as a child and later in Germany, Bulgaria and Lithuania, which I regularly announce in a brazen attempt to sound more interesting than I really am.

I eventually obtained an honours degree in biological sciences at the University of Sussex longer ago than you will get me to admit, at a time when revolution amongst students was de rigeur. I then qualified as a Chartered Quantity Surveyor, much to the amusement of my nearest and dearest. This has meant that I have spent my career not doing the one thing that I always wanted to do, History.

My interests include reading and garden creation, both of which are unstructured and chaotic. I spend much of my waking life commuting by train, but this gives me the perfect opportunity to struggle with the impossible ambition of writing the perfect poem. My demonstrative failures in this enterprise must amuse my fellow passengers no end. I live with the love of my life, Lesley, am now 56, divorced with 4 kids, and everything else is looking rather too late!

In Over Your Head

Boned with rafters,
And scaled with slate,
How can a roof
Make you cry?

Yesterday,
It was a plain roof,
Tiled to the other
Roofs of the town,
Terracotta in time.

Today this
Roof is a reptile
Over her bed,
You can no longer visit,
The shroud that it is.

Damage glues you
To the road outside,
Sticky with distress and
With nowhere to park.

Insufficient Evidence

And the opening dawn watches
With the myopic haze of an early day,
As geese fly their morning
Through the passing of night,
Before a felt magenta sky.

Sharp long-necked black aeroplanes,
Aerodynamic and fantastic,
Barking like sea lions
In time to their wings’ beat and
Their synchronised lunging,
The birds shuffle their leaders
With the indecision of democracy,
And honk their support.

Pointing their lives at the wind,
They fly for the sea with
Darwinian rigour,
And later, tenaciously home,
Their life force behind them,
Behind their moves, guiding
The resolute intention of lineage –
Of cryptic descent.

The day will likely end again
With an opaque density of motive
From a futile enquiry,
But this dawn is once more demanding
A coherent account of design,
From the geese, of their days.

Tea Break at Ebbsfleet

The sky Hovis-sliced
On stubble butter,
Pickles of buildings
And a crust of mud.

Kent’s sun the corner
Of a gold lunchbox,
Rising slow as dough,
In garden country.

Steel wielded by
Navvies in hard hats,
Plating a picnic
Upon the railway.

Déjeuner sur l’herbe,
The land as quarry,
Larded with concrete
And its goose cooked.

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