Locks Rust (2019)   

This self-published collection comprises three parts:  Swoop in the Barn encounters nature, Seeds Stray brings more socially critical and autobiographical poems, while A Different Anchoring traces inner responses to surprise and beauty. 

Rusted locks may in time become friable, open to hiddenness. These poems look ambivalently at both a childhood by the river Severn and a past of politics and comradeship.  A mountainous area in France draws out the lure of chaotic fears and things out of reach, with indebtedness to Bonnefoy, Dickinson, Gascoyne and Gurney. Eight of its poems were translated into German in Stadtlichter Presse 10, 2020. 

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Poetry Salzburg Review found ‘glittering language . . . full of marvels’,, and ‘complex meditations on political times and political places’. It quoted “Reading Bonnefoy” as a summation of much of the collection: “Reading his words gives access to an otherness, / an angel in the dark, just fleetingly, / an offered chest to lean against, a most true home, // yet intimately going elsewhere, to the unknown”.  

Carole Satyamurti — ‘What a beautiful book – both the contents, and as an object. Reading it, I very much get a sense of the right words in the right place, and of a vivid engagement with objects of the natural and the human-made world.’

Anne Fallas — ‘They are wonderful!! Such richness and vitality. Your poetry opens the door to another world, a different sight . . . what wonderful pictures you create!’

Beware the Truth that’s Manacled (erbacce-press 2022)

A corona of 14 sonnets, this chapbook tackles the psychic underworld of racial experience, while turning the mirror to legacies of ‘whiteness’. It intertwines struggles in my personal life, tortured emotions in plantation life, and the political and economic drivers of Virginian slavery with their continuing stranglehold on geo-politics and on humanity.

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London Grip (in a review by Harriet Thistlethwaite 2023) commented: ‘The poems open with “My father claimed we civilised the world”. That indeed is a truth that’s manacled. At once ‘my’ father raises the image of ‘Our Father’…  I  found ‘great sensitivity to linking, in sounds, timbre and meaning. The language used continues to be body brutish and darkly cruel in resonance: “There’s terror in prising wounds so glued, it takes such guts . . . “

Steffen Krüger ‘I find them very touching and engaging, not only in comfortable ways...  "the white child, already adept, struts on in its privilege"…  I constantly had to ask myself whether that was me…’ 

Julie Botticello — ‘How wonderfully you’ve woven personal biography with global history.’ 

Pat Manchester — ‘The poems really hit me, whacked me in the heart - I loved them too.’ 

Lizzard Looks

https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/books/prue-chamberlayne-lizard-looks-704

An invitation into vivid in-the-moment experiences and discoveries about being. Many poems share the delight and surprise of close observation and self-inquiry in the steep-valleyed North Aveyron in France. From the minuscule to the immense, nature sharpens our sensibilities and awareness of ‘force in frailty’, the significance of mythology, and the depth of our own inner worlds. Apart from its beauty, the lizzard intrigues for its way of looking at the poet, which seems mutual. But is it?  Or is nature indifferent? Will we soon be gone, leaving the natural world to recover from our depredations? 

In four sections, Seasoned Script starts from the small and delicate, with seasonal change as forms of scribing. Elemental springs from the mercurial beauty of water in lakes, rivers, waterfalls and intimate relationships, the sea a holding power in grieving. The poems depict artistry at eye-level where water, air and wind meet, shores that reshape with each tide, rain and streams battling rocks to form rivers, falls and age-old mythologies, clouds stage-managing sunlight, rocks inspiring architecture. What the Angel Might have Said in Response builds towards strident outrage. It celebrates and questions conundrums around politics over a lifetime, across cultures and species, with the ‘fling’ and ‘venture’ of Heidegger.  Air’s so Much More that Empty Space focusses on choreographies of shade and shadow, murmuration, storms, dunlins in sea wind and waves. Then sounds, the timpani and stealth of rain, slosh and rock of car wash, screech of London underground – the beauty and the sordid of urban life. It ends with the finesse of grass snakes, bats and lizards, and wonder at cross-species communication.

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"Sumptuous. ‘At Lake Level’ is a lovely piece, full of beautiful observations with a clever premise. "

Dawn Bauling, The Dawntreader 

"Your flare for imagery and the strong sense of movement throughout is beautiful.  ‘Wild Water’ is cinematic — it feels like we move between different lenses zooming in and out, which is very effective. I enjoyed the almost volta in stanza 5, from guide to guided, clarity to uncertainty and questioning.  You are a very strong writer with a unique perspective. "

Laurie,  And Other Poems

"Your poems are a true delight and are very special. I love their sensuousness and the evocations they arouse in me of woodland, of smells, sounds and touch, the fullness of the natural world, and especially of light and shadow. The whole thing made me think of Dante’s venture into his dark wood, the darkness and light we encounter in our hearts." 

Rhoda Bucknill, historian and writer 

 Pendulum

Here love, lone parenting, death and its aftermath intertwine with reflections on rifts and shifts in social culture and outsider difficulties in finding meaning in naming, language, witchcraft, and taboos around the dead. Seeking publication, this pamphlet of 25 poems turns on a mixed heritage relationship, described by a Uganda as a generational marker for both societies. It has been warmly received by Seren Press and long-listed by Dithering Chaps. 

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‘Are we condemned forever to remain the “other” to ourselves and to each other? Chamberlayne’s lapidary poetics lend a surrealist hardness to pungent memories and apostrophes to ghosts while offering a necessary distance from something that is still too raw even to define. These powerful poems, tingling with sensuousness and burnished by grief, are perfect fragments held together by a kintsugi of love, loss and regret – and the often unbearable contradiction of the absent present in the present.’ 

 Will Yeoman, CEO of Writing WA; former Literary Editor of The West Australian

The voice of the poems is reflective and meditative — seeking words to cross bridges in space and time and culture. I love the line 'I stepped in bare' for its clarity and the way it breaks the rhythm of longer lines. 'Succour' is studded with local detail, soothes the fear of othering felt by a white woman, its form like a dance on the page. 

David Herring Dithering Chaps 

Twists and turns and mystery, dark places where questions hang like strange fruit, and raw feelings and searching questions on many twitchy topics that we mostly just don’t want to talk about. I loved ‘jutting chins of whites, their skirting past’, ‘We’re chained, we chafe’, ‘our scaffold contorted at its joints’, ‘Am I a ghost, white skin, white hair, white blouse?’   

Caroline Jovicevic, silk weaver 

While some traditional conservatives may scorn the idea of a cross-cultural romance, this poet is able to give it much needed context. ‘Remembrance’ explores the potency of memory.  Memory is not just in our thoughts but also in historical facts, in settings, in conversations and as the poems play out, in those who live an extension of the departed. In this case, it was the son. A lot of memories will be stirred as people recollect the pre-Independence times, when people were forced to navigate their own personal journey alongside political transitions. I recommend that students, literary groups, academics and arts lovers, read this collection and form their own connection with the journeys portrayed.
Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva, Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation