Elisabeth Sennitt Clough is the author of Glass (Best Pamphlet Saboteur Awards 2017) and a full collection, Sightings (Michael Schmidt Award for Best Portfolio). A poem from Sightings was published in the Forward Book of Poetry 2018. Other poems have appeared in The Rialto, Poem, Mslexia, Magma and Stand.
A Brief History of Forgotten Local Places
Beggars’ Bush Field:
where tramps gathered at night before entering the village. This hour was their salvation: the remains of the widow’s cottage, their temple. And they prayed among the overgrown shrubbery and clumps of long yellow grass for King Cob, their leader who’d passed.
Quarterway House:
the ramshackle tollhouse, built to mark the distance from village to city and its palatial replacement, also known as the insurance job, after a lorry missed the bend.
Dimock’s Cote:
nightly, the anglers come to sit in the old boathouse and guard the riverbank – their aim, to catch the unlicensed foreign, who cook pike, dace and bream on makeshift stoves. That anyone should eat the fish they’ve caught – rather than slip it free of the barb to return it gill-slashed into the Ouse.
Five Miles From Anywhere:
not just because it’s rare as a corncrake in South-east England, but because its overgrown banks and spinneys lend themselves to a creep of darkling beetles, a knot of natterjack toads.
Elisabeth Sennitt Clough
