Böcker av Claire Gathercole

In this second volume of poetry, Claire Gathercole's poems explore and confront the feelings engendered either by a day of tragedy or by some other stimulus which encourages a poem.

Claire Gathercole's poems explore family feelings and reflections at different stages in life, from the child who wants her mother's attention to the elderly mother dying of dementia. She is married with two children and five grandchildren.

We have all been on a journey through the horrors and limitations and isolations and quarantines of Covid recently, which have led us on a type of pilgrimage of endurance. You'll find a poem here called Those Pandemic Words, many of which gained new meanings when we were daily exhorted to follow the rules. However, most of these poems try to find ways not only through our present problems, but also through all the difficulties life throws at us as we try to find a pathway through them that makes sense.

This third volume of poems by Claire Gathercole has been distilled from her experience of grief on the death of her husband. It also explores how family love can continue in spite of loss, and it looks for ways to live with and survive sorrow.

This is the story of a young woman's dilemma in World War II. How can she and those she loves survive the problems they face?Our story opens as Hetty prepares for Will's return from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. She has learnt that Will has been tortured and disfigured in the camp and it was only the thought of her and his daughter, Mary, conceived on their wedding night, which kept him alive.However, two years earlier, Hetty thought that her hasty marriage to Will had ended when she got the telegram "e;Missing, presumed dead!"e; Now he was coming home. How can she tell him about her new baby, Dorothy?Staying with Will's parents in Somerset, a young asthmatic teacher, David, is kind to Hetty and her young child, Mary, and they fall in love. But then there is the problem of what happened when they went blackberrying.How on earth can these damaged people find a new way to live?What will the outcome be?