Poetry review – PEDESTRIAN IN THE MULTIVERSE: John Snelling appreciates both the poetic craft and the range of subject matter in Claire Booker’s new collection
Pedestrian in the Multiverse
Claire Booker
Waterloo Press (Hove), 2026
ISBN 978-1-915241-29-0
80pp £12
The title of this collection suggests something that is soon apparent from reading the poems. This is that Claire Booker is as complete a counterexample as one could hope to find to C.P. Snow’s idea of two separated cultures. Her frame of reference is extensive and in poems such as, ‘Triple Science Lesson’, ‘Schrödinger’s Cat Conducts a Thought Experiment’, and the collection’s title poem, she displays an ability to deploy scientific concepts in a way that is entirely integrated into poetry that illuminates the aspects of life she wishes to show us. Equally, she draws on the visual arts and in the first section of the collection there are poems that explicitly refer to works by David Hockney, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Monet and a Palaeolithic bone carver. As one would expect, throughout the collection there is a comparable degree of literary reference. Cinema, music, and political issues are not neglected either. In none of this is there any sense of the poetry being strained by the learning expressed in it. In these poems the reader will encounter a first-rate mind that has fully assimilated what it has learned and is very skilled at crafting ways to express itself effectively.
The poem, ‘Northern Light’ is a response to Vermeer’s painting ‘Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid’. It is written in the voice of the light that illuminates the room in the painting and uses the light’s perspective to comment on what the painting shows. The final stanza illustrates how well she does this and, in an entirely natural way, incorporates some Dutch words into a poem responding to a Dutch artist.
Yet I know how to flare a pin at the huisvrau’s throat,
bring pearls to her ears. Along the tapestry that smothers
her table, I seek what doesn’t show – tender fingers,
girls’ eyes burned by stitch work. My Danae, my vessel
I snap you into shape – naer het leven. Look carefully.
I’m offering you your face in that stained glass.
The poems in this collection demonstrate an admirable mastery of the craft of poetry. To illustrate this I shall give an extract from ‘Signers on the Victoria Line’ where Claire Booker uses breaks between words and lines to convey a sense of the hand movements of people using sign language.
The carriage rackets like a printing press
Sends all I want to say inwards.
I think of how we used to talk: the shape of yes
in each other’s mouths.
A boy and girl, deaf to all noise, sculpt
landscapes
out of air mouths
wide as moons
rain in their fingers
eyes listening sharp
for language that flies
by its kite strings
In the words, ‘’eyes listening sharp’’ there is an echo of the final line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 23, ‘’To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.’’
Probably the most striking example of sheer technical skill in the collection is ‘Winter Tunnel with Snow, March 2006’. This is a tour de force of a side-by-side inverse mirror poem. It could only be illustrated by quoting the whole poem so, having drawn your attention to it, I shall pass on.
Towards the end of the collection there are a number of poems in which personal and autobiographical subjects come to the fore and are set against the material and technological aspects of life. A good example is ‘My mother in a two-piece bathing suit’. That title is also the first line of the poem, which continues,
is made of upright lines attempting to curve.
The photo can’t capture her bread-and-butter
scent which lingers as an enduring part of us.
Reading these lines we can immediately see and feel the contrast between the fixed, unmoving, lines of the photograph and the memory of the living, moving woman. The movement of the first stanza is from the separate to the connected. In the second and third stanzas the poem moves in the opposite direction.
Those preternatural eyes pierce the hazy
Agfa colour into the man behind the camera.
A perfect pose, in perfect plumage, perfect
mother of the perfect pigeon pair. A liminal
space lies between us, as if she’s carefully torn
herself free – …
Alliteration is used in two ways here. In the first line, ‘preternatural’ and ‘pierce’ in relation to the mother’s eyes, give a vivid sense of her as very alive, alert and striking. With the words ‘perfect pose’ there is a shift to something unmoving that should not be changed. Within two lines, the word ‘perfect’ is used four times and together with the relentless alliteration of ‘p’ sounds we are led to the ‘liminal space’ and the mother having torn herself free. This sense of separation is further explored until we reach the final two lines of the poem in which what all this means in human, feeling, terms is made plain.
My brother’s wooden yacht has lost a sail.
I smile hard, offer up my proud red bucket.
Two of the most moving poems in the collection concern the poet’s father. In ‘Visiting my father’ she engages with the issue of dementia in a close family member. In this poem she uses a technique she employed in ‘Signers on the Victoria Line’, that of breaks between words and lines, to convey the sense of a mind that moves back and forth between memory and forgetting and has now a hazy grasp of time. The poem begins with,
how willingly he works for his moment
of light our repertoire is nothing
new edging in wonder
along creaking ice he always asking
when will she be back?
in this white-out he is not quite lost
There is considerable subtlety in the way the technique is used. The letters ‘i’ in ‘his’, ‘is’ and ‘in’ are aligned vertically on the page suggesting that a core of identity remains. The question as to when his wife will be back is not broken up, implying that this is something that he cares about so deeply that it remains as an island of coherence in his mind.
In conclusion, this is a collection I can thoroughly recommend as engaging the head, the heart and the imagination.
Oct 13 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Claire Booker
Poetry review – PEDESTRIAN IN THE MULTIVERSE: John Snelling appreciates both the poetic craft and the range of subject matter in Claire Booker’s new collection
Pedestrian in the Multiverse
Claire Booker
Waterloo Press (Hove), 2026
ISBN 978-1-915241-29-0
80pp £12
The title of this collection suggests something that is soon apparent from reading the poems. This is that Claire Booker is as complete a counterexample as one could hope to find to C.P. Snow’s idea of two separated cultures. Her frame of reference is extensive and in poems such as, ‘Triple Science Lesson’, ‘Schrödinger’s Cat Conducts a Thought Experiment’, and the collection’s title poem, she displays an ability to deploy scientific concepts in a way that is entirely integrated into poetry that illuminates the aspects of life she wishes to show us. Equally, she draws on the visual arts and in the first section of the collection there are poems that explicitly refer to works by David Hockney, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Monet and a Palaeolithic bone carver. As one would expect, throughout the collection there is a comparable degree of literary reference. Cinema, music, and political issues are not neglected either. In none of this is there any sense of the poetry being strained by the learning expressed in it. In these poems the reader will encounter a first-rate mind that has fully assimilated what it has learned and is very skilled at crafting ways to express itself effectively.
The poem, ‘Northern Light’ is a response to Vermeer’s painting ‘Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid’. It is written in the voice of the light that illuminates the room in the painting and uses the light’s perspective to comment on what the painting shows. The final stanza illustrates how well she does this and, in an entirely natural way, incorporates some Dutch words into a poem responding to a Dutch artist.
Yet I know how to flare a pin at the huisvrau’s throat,
bring pearls to her ears. Along the tapestry that smothers
her table, I seek what doesn’t show – tender fingers,
girls’ eyes burned by stitch work. My Danae, my vessel
I snap you into shape – naer het leven. Look carefully.
I’m offering you your face in that stained glass.
The poems in this collection demonstrate an admirable mastery of the craft of poetry. To illustrate this I shall give an extract from ‘Signers on the Victoria Line’ where Claire Booker uses breaks between words and lines to convey a sense of the hand movements of people using sign language.
The carriage rackets like a printing press
Sends all I want to say inwards.
I think of how we used to talk: the shape of yes
in each other’s mouths.
A boy and girl, deaf to all noise, sculpt
landscapes
out of air mouths
wide as moons
rain in their fingers
eyes listening sharp
for language that flies
by its kite strings
In the words, ‘’eyes listening sharp’’ there is an echo of the final line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 23, ‘’To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.’’
Probably the most striking example of sheer technical skill in the collection is ‘Winter Tunnel with Snow, March 2006’. This is a tour de force of a side-by-side inverse mirror poem. It could only be illustrated by quoting the whole poem so, having drawn your attention to it, I shall pass on.
Towards the end of the collection there are a number of poems in which personal and autobiographical subjects come to the fore and are set against the material and technological aspects of life. A good example is ‘My mother in a two-piece bathing suit’. That title is also the first line of the poem, which continues,
is made of upright lines attempting to curve.
The photo can’t capture her bread-and-butter
scent which lingers as an enduring part of us.
Reading these lines we can immediately see and feel the contrast between the fixed, unmoving, lines of the photograph and the memory of the living, moving woman. The movement of the first stanza is from the separate to the connected. In the second and third stanzas the poem moves in the opposite direction.
Those preternatural eyes pierce the hazy
Agfa colour into the man behind the camera.
A perfect pose, in perfect plumage, perfect
mother of the perfect pigeon pair. A liminal
space lies between us, as if she’s carefully torn
herself free – …
Alliteration is used in two ways here. In the first line, ‘preternatural’ and ‘pierce’ in relation to the mother’s eyes, give a vivid sense of her as very alive, alert and striking. With the words ‘perfect pose’ there is a shift to something unmoving that should not be changed. Within two lines, the word ‘perfect’ is used four times and together with the relentless alliteration of ‘p’ sounds we are led to the ‘liminal space’ and the mother having torn herself free. This sense of separation is further explored until we reach the final two lines of the poem in which what all this means in human, feeling, terms is made plain.
My brother’s wooden yacht has lost a sail.
I smile hard, offer up my proud red bucket.
Two of the most moving poems in the collection concern the poet’s father. In ‘Visiting my father’ she engages with the issue of dementia in a close family member. In this poem she uses a technique she employed in ‘Signers on the Victoria Line’, that of breaks between words and lines, to convey the sense of a mind that moves back and forth between memory and forgetting and has now a hazy grasp of time. The poem begins with,
how willingly he works for his moment
of light our repertoire is nothing
new edging in wonder
along creaking ice he always asking
when will she be back?
in this white-out he is not quite lost
There is considerable subtlety in the way the technique is used. The letters ‘i’ in ‘his’, ‘is’ and ‘in’ are aligned vertically on the page suggesting that a core of identity remains. The question as to when his wife will be back is not broken up, implying that this is something that he cares about so deeply that it remains as an island of coherence in his mind.
In conclusion, this is a collection I can thoroughly recommend as engaging the head, the heart and the imagination.