Frosted Fire First Pamphlet Award winner 2023
Clare Starling’s first collection, Magpie’s Nest, won her the Frosted Fire First Pamphlet Award in 2023, and her award includes publication of this book and 50 free copies. Magpie’s Nest was published and launched online on 25 November. Copies can be ordered from the publisher here.
Signed copies can be ordered direct from Clare Starling.
Clare started writing poetry when her son was diagnosed with autism during lockdown. Her poems have appeared in magazines and journals including Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Obsessed With Pipework, The Interpreter’s House, The Passionfruit Review, Wildfire Words and others, and commended in the AUB and Brian Dempsey Memorial prizes.
Clare particularly loves writing about our connection with nature, and about how neurodiversity can give different perspectives on the world.
Praise for Magpie’s Nest
What a great collection. These poems are a love song from a mother to a son. Unique verses written with great perception and sensitivity.
Visceral poetry, conjuring a world particular and familiar to anyone in the neuro-diverse community.
Henry Normal
“A profoundly beautiful collection – original, full of love, warmth, wisdom and understanding of difference.”
Chrys Salt
‘Autistic Weather’ is perfect in its simplicity of form and precision of detail. ‘Your weather is devastating’ says one line and the impact on the reader is equally devastating. A tender, poignant, beautiful poem.’
Praise for ‘Autistic Weather’, joint winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize 2023, from judge Mandy Pannett.
A truly heartwarming, heartbreaking, collection of poems, tenderly wrapped in rich, inventive imagery. Pictures of the bond between mother and son will remain imprinted on the reader’s memory long after the book is closed.
Marilyn Timms
Author’s preface to Magpie’s Nest
In midwinter, deep in the pandemic, my wild, imaginative, extraordinary child began to fall to pieces. It was the start of a new understanding that changed everything I thought I knew about my family.
These poems are about how everyday moments become a territory of love and suffering for the family of a child with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, and how a diagnosis can open up new perceptions of what is inherited and what needs to be relearned.
This pamphlet is for anyone who is a parent or has been a child, but especially for anyone who has ever wondered whether they are ‘normal’ or struggled to comply with society’s expectations.
More information about autism can be found at autism.org.uk
Three poems from Magpie’s Nest
Haircut
Your hair is a wild mushroom
no – a squirrel’s nest
the colour of Heinz Tomato
the colour of orange leaves, you look
like a child in oils, lavishly
ringleted who has travelled
in time – through a hedge – and
glares out, weird as the world.
Your fork-in-the-socket frizz attracts
praise in the Temperate House, but
at school, rules are rules, and you’re an
explosive reaction of copper.
Tie it back or cut it
is a declaration of violence
your personal Bastille
you bitterly reject the guillotine
You’re incorruptible, while I
whisper on about self-care, gagging
my fear-fuelled fury lest I come at you
at night with blades. Instead
I pressure you with my soft
tectonic weight until you give me
thirty seconds with the scissors,
no time for neatening up
so you remain shock-headed
and who says you shouldn’t be let out like that?
They should see your sapphire eyes
the worlds that curl out from you
sitting between my legs, warm in pyjamas
birthing new planets, monsters and gods
while I comb spray through your snarls
trying not to hurt you
Ribbon
When you cry
I gather it in like a wide red ribbon
it keeps coming, like when you press
print on a thousand page document
If I put out a hand, you’ll take it
let me lead you up the stairs
the ribbon looping out
between the banister spindles
I gather it in my arms as you
battle against each item of uniform
the ribbon spurts out between
bursts of the electric toothbrush
It fills the car as I drive
it spills out shiny as blood
when you open the door
it gushes, then at last it stops
you cross the road into school
you give me a little wave
and I think what am I going to do
with all this ribbon?
The Bee Saver
You always spot tired bees
and then we can’t move on
until I’ve got out my card holder
they clamber on, waving their feelers
we scout for flowers between
brick walls and spiny city planting
into this untended patch
of mallow and borage
crawls the bee
early spring, you saw one
on the way to school
I could not rush you past
I offered it my card. It roused itself,
climbed on and rode with me.
I made up sugar water
tipped the damp bee until it rested
one weightless leg upon my finger
leaned in, unrolled its tongue
drank its miniscule fill.
I left it in a patch of sun
in an hour the bee had gone
perhaps a queen waking
from her winter sleep
to begin a new nest
you were so proud of me
you called me The Bee Saver
I think it was the honour of my life
Autistic weather
A storm bursts in
it rolls you on the sofa
spraying rain
your hair thrashed into tangles
you shudder under
terrors of endless sleet
I coax you with cold chicken
like a half-drowned feral cat
Once on dry ground, you sniff at
a boiled egg, accept
a packet of Wotsits
and a passion fruit
warm and fed
you start singing
something cloudless
of your own creation
your weather is devastating
all I can do is forecast
put up storm boards for you
sweep up your broken glass
Order form for a post-free copy of Magpie’s Nest from Frosted Fire
This post-free offer is available until after the online launch on November 25.
Signed copies can be ordered direct from the author via this order form.
Clare will be signing her own copies of the book and receives all of the payments from these orders.