ISBN: 978-1-915108-43-3

Published 27 September 2026

32 pages (pamphlet)

“These poems are anarchic and erotic but also delivered with an emotional and historical precision I find breathtaking. Palomines unfolds in a world that merges the inner and outer life, and it’s a world where I felt completely at home – made welcome, curious, sometimes a little uneasy. Powerfully visual (like watching Derek Jarman or Agnes Varda while high on a kind of spiritual frenzy), exquisitely phrased. Clarkson is a singular talent and this is an enchanting and wise collection; a highlight in an already exuberant and bold body of work.” —Luke Kennard

Cherry Blossom Aubade

I am mistress of silence. I lift my top sullenly to the drunks emerging from The Cherry Tree at midnight. I collect blossoms. When my skirt is full I take them to the artificial lake in Ernesto’s garden and I set them sailing one by one in the pale morning hours, little flesh-flowers. I begin a school of flesh. I call Ernesto to my chamber at 4. He arrives, dishevelled, in an ashy suit, carrying his French poodle beribboned in blue, which attracts me. He asks me questions and I demur. Like one potholing in vertiginous caverns, I fear to miss my step. I drop a stone to sound the depth. There is nothing to hear, nothing to see. I am mistress of all I cannot see.

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“Like suddenly releasing the handbrake on an untested vehicle, or the moment after ingesting a psychedelic, a new pamphlet by Geraldine Clarkson can induce a giddy sensation somewhere between delight and panic. These mostly prose poems dip you head-first in a swiftly-moving stream of intense sensation, brilliant observation, and unsettling insight received almost as muttered asides from whoever is holding you by the heels: ‘When we think of the poets we are lost’ they declare; ‘I learned to speak in splinters of ice’ they recall. Several characteristics will be familiar to devotees of her work: the lush colour palette formed by a nexus of food, flower, and textile based imagery; the over-intimate proximity of religious and sexual ecstasies; the startling confessions, as though you had suddenly woken up in a confessional, but on the wrong side of the screen. There is a recurrent exploration of the relationship between illness and the transcendental, which produces some of the most moving poems here. As she writes in ‘The Soonest Rotten’, ‘It grew where the unkindness arrow lodged’. Like the mandorla in a Venn diagram between David Lynch and Leonora Carrington, Palomines drops you into a media res you may not want (or be able) to leave. It might just be her finest pamphlet to date.” —WN Herbert

Palomines by Geraldine Clarkson

Name: Palomines by Geraldine Clarkson
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Her Candyfloss Lover

She felt a lick of desire from the bottom to the top of her body. His light-as-air fluffy pink head filled her gaze, wafts of candy sending high sweet notes through the air when he moved. She had always been a savoury person, favouring meaty hunks, fresh from the farm, dripping with juices and dark-red blood, and eliciting a visceral pull in her groin. This was much freer, sent a rush all through her, making her feel like dancing over the counter, like joining a circus, like unwinding him into long sugar strings before ravelling them up again with herself inside them.

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Howl

I am howling with nicknames, strikeful maiden, waterbearer, wayfarer, living the backlash. Here is my aftermath. When I was fifteen I struggled across a moor, there was a soft snow underneath, on the thaw, things were not crisp, I found shelter at night in farmhouses with hospitable farmers, slavering, and suspicious grandmothers by the fire, sketchy albatrosses. I went to Sweden, following the snow. The snow in the north was fine; bona fide. I took a small room with a man called Polarsson. He and his wife had squeezed themselves into a cubicle with blue walls. I learned to speak in splinters of ice.
Geraldine Clarkson is of Irish origin and lives in the U.K. She spent time in a silent religious order in Peru before she began writing poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals internationally, including Poetry, The Times Literary Supplement, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Mslexia, and The Little Review, and she has performed at the Royal Albert Hall and various festivals and other poetry venues in the U.K., Ireland and the U.S. She has two full-length poetry collections (most recently Medlars, from Shearsman Books), and Palomines is her lucky seventh poetry pamphlet.

Palomines by Geraldine Clarkson

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