Singing at the Bone Tree

Fountain poet Rachael Clyne’s prize-winning second collection will be published by Indigo Dreams on June 4th.

Singing at the Bone Tree
Women gather for a residential course in the Scottish Highlands on writing the wild, only to find the surroundings turn out to be fenced-off moor, banks of forestry and mountains that sit firmly in the distance. The journey to reclaim the wild self inevitably encounters frustration and grief for our treatment of the earth. But if you accept what is, listen and watch – the wild reveals itself.

Rachael Clyne is a psychotherapist, poet and writer from Glastonbury. She attends and performs at poetry groups in Bath and Wells. Her work appears in several anthologies, and her first collection She Who Walks With Stones and Sings was published in 2006 (PS Avalon). Rachael’s love of nature and understanding of the human journey give her work a depth and earthiness, with humour even in the darkest places.

“Clyne’s poems are as earthy, rich, feral as the landscapes she writes about. Woven through all of them is the theme of digging to the bedrock, the bones – of human, of land. Her concerns are territory, boundaries, fences – and how we might slip through the wires. At times, as in the final poem, she achieves a near-shapeshift before our eyes.”
 ROSELLE ANGWIN 
Poet, Author, Writing Tutor

SINGING AT THE BONE TREE WAS A WINNER OF THE GEOFF STEVENS MEMORIAL POETRY PRIZE 2013

Marking Territories

It’s the usual room shuffle
claiming our spot
proximity to loo
preferred mug.

Outside, brash wind
monochrome mountains
tussocks of grass, gorse.

But we are all fenced-in
wired to worked out ways
territory divided: rooms, heath. 

Mine is the outcrop near the bone tree
three gates, two fields, four fences away.
Our task: to slip through the wires.