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Facing: Poems from the Dorothy Clive Garden

Facing is a pamphlet of 12 poems written during Sheard’s year as Poet in Residence at the Dorothy Clive Garden. The Garden was orginally designed as a therapeutic space for the wife of Sir Harry Clive, whose wife had Parkinson’s Disease, and after her death was expanded as a memorial garden. The poems in the collection seek to extend a tradition of ‘poetry of the garden’ in English literature, placing this mode in a public setting. The 12 poems explore, variously, gardens as peaceful spaces, as tamed place, as metaphor for love, healing, memorial, and the sense of permanence made of transient things. The collection is specifically conceived as being a way of bringing poetry to audiences who may not naturally engage with it, by correlating the experience of a particular place with writings about it. Some of the poems are ‘found’ from the texts left by visitors – memorial bench plaques, and visitor’s book entries, for example; others relate parts of the Dorothy Clive Garden to the love story which lies behind it. In form, the poems are clear, accessible and precise. Some use formal metrical structures to embed the work in the memories of engagement with poems at school, where many non-readers of poetry – especially of the older generations which make up the larger proportion of visitors to the Garden – last encountered it.