Clare Crossman

    Clare Crossman started her writing life, aged 26 in Youth Theatre with children who had been excluded from school. She then wrote for The Dukes Playhouse Theatre in Education Company Lancaster, Prism Arts Cumbria. Her plays were given rehearsed readings by Contact Theatre Manchester, Pocket Theatre Cumbria and Live Theatre Newcastle.

    She also wrote poetry. After first being published by the Lancaster Literature Festival; in 1996 her first pamphlet collection ‘Landscapes’  won the Redbeck Competition. Described as a poet who was ‘challenging in tone, and full of feeling not easily set loose’ ( Poetry Review), since then she has continued to direct, and teach in adult education and run writing workshops in primary and secondary schools. In 1999 she published ‘Silent Reading’ a sequence of 10 poems and lithographs, which were shown at the Cambridge WordFest 2003, as a result of readings at CB1 Firewater Press published another pamphlet ‘Going Back’ in 2002, which went into a second edition. In 2004 a sequence ‘The Shell Notebook Poems’ was published by Shoestring Press.

    She is currently involved with Greenwood a group which performs poetry, music, and storytelling, in rural communities and unusual settings. Fenlight was a new and personal response to the South of England. Some of the poems from the sequence can be found in Chapman, Scintilla, Saw.

    Here are the two poems that the songs Fenlight and Gypsy Tale are based on

    Fenlight

    is grey, a yellow
    wash on paper, a tincture from stone,

    Each view a mirage, promising
    a border which turn another page.


    Because of the sky's perspective
    it seems you can see forever into continents

    spires float like lantern slides, a shadow play of land.

    It might all be painted on silk.  Screens that lure the eye
    to dazzle it with seaboards and fogs, long stretches of sand.

    The sea wants it back in its tides,
    Underneath each one street town, a rush of rivers.

    It is wise to keep a boat, against the flood,
    l    et ivy grow over the widows

    in case the light maddens you
    makes you crazy with dreams of drowned cities.

    Or your eyes are blinded to the milk white of flint,
    the silver of an empty oyster shell.

    So captivated you might be by its transience,
    and mirrors, the pastel houses clumped around ponds.

    In the brilliance of salt, on jewelled mornings,
    the ice floes gather, in the east running tide.

    copyright Clare Crossman

    Gypsies Tale

    I tell a gypsies tale.

    Our caravans along the hawthorn hedge,
    conjuring a world no one can place.

    I tell a gypsies tale.

    Our love of following seasons,
    that once was harvest, now has to do
    with the pick axing of roads.

    I tell a gypsies tale.

    Ramona isolated in the playground,
    Too much a mix of land-lore and towpath
    for any conversation.

    I tell a gypsies tale,

    Scattering dogs, which silk across the skyline
    to catch, Rabbits for the pot.
    One roof on which to hear the rain.

    I tell a gypsies tale,

    Night fires and lamps, cooking pots,
    A tearing of lace, when we are moved on.

    I tell a gypsies tale,

    Those few who watch the zodiac and know fate,
    give us coal for winter.  Let us tether horses

    I tell a gypsies tale.

    Our windows open, doors rarely locked
    The long road to walk on, the ways we
    know to live together and how we share.



    copyright Clare Crossman