Waterloo Press, September 2019

Following a Seamus Heaney Award shortlisting in 2012 for Excisions , Clare Best’s second full collection looks into the many faces of love and relationship. In poems that follow a fictional duo through courtship, cohabitation, separations, reunions, and on towards the end of life, the title section of the book anatomizes the idiosyncrasies, fantasies and surprises of long-term coupledom. A second cycle of poems, Moon House , honours some of the loves central to Best’s own life – between wife and husband, daughter and mother, mother and son, son and father – relationships lived, and recollected in absentia.

Clare Best’s closely observed, exquisitely wrought poems about love and its endurance strike a balance between the interiors of domestic settings and the natural world. Taking us from Seaford beach and the English countryside to County Clare and the cafés of Madrid and Turin, they evoke a keen sense of wonder and joy, grief and loss – and how extraordinary that this is often achieved in so few words. Mara Bergman

This is a book that is brimming with ideas, thinking, experiments with form and intrigue. Mat Riches in London Grip