By Clare Best
Clare Best’s latest poetry collection Each Other came out with Waterloo Press in 2019. Recently she has been working on opera and other vocal projects at Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
Twitter: @clarebest1
Instagram: clarepbest
Lockdown in a quiet village on the edge of Tunstall Forest near the Suffolk coast was not, on the face of it, so distant from normal everyday life here. Yet everything was different. Like many people, my concentration was sometimes poor and I spent too many hours on my phone and laptop hopping between news articles, social media and random topics of research. This found poem, woven from my browsing history, projects some of the strangeness and fearfulness of the locked-down mind, teased by the comforts and frustrations of internet existence.
This is wonderful — it exactly captures the attempt to impose purpose on the fragmentation so many of us are feeling, and the fragmentation of identity/ies that comes with it. How to be woman, reader, writer, gardener, thinker, cook; the frustrations of imperfect technology (that error message — again?), reminders of those enraging news items, and iruptions of the slightly absurd (egg and mango chutney? Really?) A brilliant found poem!
I really love this piece – the cumulative effect of so many things vying for attention. It’s overwhelming and disorientating, and a perfect reflection of recent times.
Thank you Leanne. I’m glad the poem resonated with you. 🙂