The Adjustments (Two Rivers Press, 2024) assembles a narrative from pick-pocketed moments of a life presented in backwards motion. The poems within speak of multiple losses, grief – historic and new – and yet, the reader emerges from the pages with a fullness, a sense of calm completion – the sum of their own adjustments perhaps?

Now is the time to admit that I know the poet well. I followed in Claire’s footsteps as organiser of Reading’s Poets’ Café and a daunting prospect that was. Accomplished, attentive, skilled: her poetry reflects all these personal qualities. But what I find most impressive about this new work is its wisdom. Because despite the focus subjects of loss, bereavement, attempts to fix what is fractured, these poems are as profound as they are beautiful; they feature heartbreak with gratitude at its core.

I echo poet Sharon Black’s description of this collection as ‘a song of praise’; the jubilant appreciation of life and the world around us is in abundance throughout. Descriptions of tangoing midges, arrowing parakeets and balletic pigeons are set against a palette of feeling skies. These tingling observations set the scene for nostalgia; memories of frog collecting, of beach-destined freewheeling with heart-pumps, bicycle pumps and ‘backwards-flying hair’, to the unexpected solace found in bereaved siblings quietly deadheading roses.

There are moments of comedy too, as Claire understands the need for balance when dealing with the potency of loss, and she succeeds in achieving a lightness without turning her back on the subject. ‘The Dead Dad Club’ is an example of this with its frank title paving the way for her honest addressing of grief, and of joining a collective:

I heard the last breath,
lived the absolute, the nothing
that came next. I walked
behind as they carried you out./I buried you.
… The medal is a weight on my chest
as I take my place in the audience.

One of my favourite poems in this collection is ‘The day I went swimming with Theresa May’, which begins in reality and culminates with the somewhat unusual fantasy of swimming with a number of late prime ministers. Then there’s the surrealness of ‘Appetite’:

Once I loved a man who ate bicycles.
Wintertime he’d kiss me with his metal-tasting mouth
… We’d have sex when he came back
and I’d find inner tubes in the bed.

These traces of absurdity make this poet human, and imaginative detours are at home with the sepia-tinged nostalgia present, also serving as a diversion which adds weight to those poems attending to more difficult subjects.

When it comes to form, The Adjustments is diverse. There’s rhythm and repetition in the poet’s use of refrains, symmetry in her mirroring and the re-emerging of symbols and poems delivered in parts, which require us to revisit subjects as our poet does. Claire pays attention to sound: beautifully observed again ‘In these days of this dying’:

there’s that word beauty again – beauty
in the burr wood’s holding on, holding in
the feather grains, making horse chestnut
into porcelain; there’s your hand, your heart –
the holding on, the holding in – how your going
will leave visible the loss, the leaving, on my skin.

Here she acknowledges what’s painful with a poem that’s searing, poignant and beautiful, typical of this collection as a whole.

With a deftness of touch and an expert handling of language, Claire weaves a narrative that’s reflective of the arbitrariness of life with its non-linear passage of time. To feel the impact of loss, love must first exist and this is pronounced in the poet’s acknowledgement of herself as the girl, the daughter, the sister, the lover, the woman. With details of her own influences at the back of the book, there is much inspiration and admiration at the heart of The Adjustments, as Claire reveals her expertise at creating the wonderful new from what has been – from butter prints and Grey’s Anatomy to Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’, honking as they fly over ‘high in the clean blue air’ letting us know they’re on their way home.

The Adjustments is available to buy from Two Rivers Press here.

Vic Pickup has published two pamphlets with Hedgehog Press, a collection with Indigo Dreams and edited Reading Poets: A New Anthology from Two Rivers Press. Vic co-organises Reading’s Poets’ Café and Stanza groups, and is a doctoral researcher working with the Mills & Boon archives held in Reading University’s Special Collections. For more information, visit www.vicpickup.com