Neil Clarkson

Biography

Long-standing member of Albert Poets in Huddersfield and prior to that Bloc poets in Leeds. Published in magazines including Pennine Platform, the Black Horse, Obsessed by Pipework. Influenced by the likes of Tony Harrison, Miroslav Holub, Selma Hill and others. I like to explore the surreal in everyday life, political themes and Northern (English) culture. I have won or been a prize-winner in competitions such as the Adoption Matters North West poetry competition and Didsbury Arts Festival competition, among others. I won the Colne Valley Sculpture Trail competition in 2009 and my winning poem which was about the industrial area of Milnsbridge in Huddersfield was imprinted into stainless steel and set into stone on the site of the trail.

Samples

A Slow Slide Light blue eyes track smeared, cracked paving, a girl on a slow slide. Head up, softly singing, a girl waiting for the clouds to fill the space. Before dark she must go to her aunties flat where tenements overlook barren fields. The girls father will not be there. He wonders what the rebels want from him this time. The speed of the slide; made sluggish by mud, scattered shrapnel, the flying waste. A girl on a slow slide. Luddism When you’ve taken the hammer to the square, smashed its enslavement, what will you do? It’s no good a pedometer telling you you’ve taken 10,000 steps today like a Stakhanovite snail. It’s no good you knocking on the door, of people tapping away like restless mice, their headphones turned to max. When you’ve taken the pickaxe to the plastic, smashed its omniprescence, what will you do? It’s no good kicking through the cans and takeaway boxes to gawp at the mound of unopened post on the floor of the gutted bookshop. It’s no good standing under the swinging sign of the boarded-up pub, where you wouldn’t have been seen dead in its glorious heyday, tutting at the tsunami of tab ends. And will you dare to shoot anyone in the groin who wields this power that refuses to dissipate, to die? Passing Things In the forest of reading, toileting, smiling in the right places, there was also a time to learn when to let go of a thing passed between two people, and to learn how a millisecond could count for so much, how two people holding the thing up, together stopped it from falling to the ground. To release the thing too soon was to rock the trust, to hold on too long was to see deep into the darkness behind the eyes. Carrot Spree Instead of feeding the pigeons with bread they came to feed rabbits on that balmy Yorkshire night. The carrots were scattered all over the square; they seemed emblematic of freedom, like the robes of Tibetan monks the fading orange of Dutch liberalism, flags for free elections in the Ukraine. They coloured decades of municipal gloom and ringed the statue with protective civic pride. The fertility of concrete had spawned the carrots. Orange-faced people sat on adjacent benches, as if freshly braised by a carrot-powered sun bed. Only when a carrot was placed on the head of the statue of the towns most famous son did things turn sour. Bat Dusk ducking down slowly and a bat is in the house. I tell it I've just come back from 'The Dracula Experience' at Whitby. Its pasta shell ears twitch a little then relax. I tell it that a swarm of wasps enveloped me in the attic and drew blood, and its tiny feet shuffle and slide across a CD. Summer still steaming through the wide open doors, I can see the bat outside moving infinitely. Slaughterhouse Trilogy 1. His beef breath nearly eats me, as he leans in. Ginger stubble looks sharp as his Butchers knives. “Now then shag” he greets, disconcerting like a summer gale, then grins as he turns the huge handle mincing meat, that seems to glow in the half light. “Tha once took me to A & E in’t van”, he says, lifting a decimated swollen thumb, ripped like an overripe tomato. “Tha ad an earring in tha right ear din’t tha”? he fingers my unpierced right ear like a kidney. Then he stands back, head cocked to one side, scrutinising me, like the flesh beneath his knives, “Is tha a puff then”? 2. “Wooorrrr, ah were on t’ nest all last neet. Wooorrrr.” He would tell me this in a raised whisper as we pulled on our pristine butchers aprons, each inevitable morning. And I would half-grimace, not knowing how to react to this carnal pride, this male preening. I would think of him as I walked home at dusk through the tall trees, where the birds would make endless journeys to build their fragile homes. I would think of the mother slipping worms through their gaping hungry beaks. I could smell the smoke in his beard before I saw him come round the steel door of the slaughterhouse, toothpick contorting through gristle teeth. “Wooorrrr, ah were on t’ nest all last neet. Wooorrrr.” 3. “Is tha a dirty bugger? Ah bet tha is. I am.” He whispers, whatever the mood, whatever needs to be expressed. White sallopette’s overflowing white wellingtons cotton peaked cap, the scent of yesterdays cuts, net attached to the back, caressing shoulders. Sexual pleasure; coterminous with the slice of the glinting knife, the laying of slippery flesh on a board continually rubbed clean. Now he’s over in the corner, grinning, gesturing, with a dangled string of sausages, then a scowl, suddenly fixed. He comes back over towards me, feels my newly-pressed lapel. “Is tha a dirty bugger? Ah bet tha is. I am.”

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.