We are marked / by the place we call home / … by the land. //
I am the daughter / of the mother of mountains
— Bonnie Thurston
They mean well, the poets of place and landscape,
but in their pages I observe I am the offspring of flat.
Only Didcot’s distant cooling towers and the Clumps
punctuated the sentences of my early geography,
my horizon a temperature inversion under high pressure
hazing my days with pollen, crop dust and coal-fired power.
Clay clods broken into fields unbroken for miles around
and a river tamed by weir and lock were my raw materials.
Here was I formed, child of an economy of head knowledge
commuting to research blocks erected on former airfields.
Yes, I admire these poets rooted in place and landscape —
their apogees and depths — but I fail to trace the poetry in flat.
Clare Bryden “Ars prosaica”, Elsewhere, “Palimpsest”, 19 December 2025.