Clare O'Brien
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clareobrien.bsky.social
Clare O'Brien
@clareobrien.bsky.social
2.1K followers 990 following 1.7K posts
Writer. Music fan. Poet in Residence, Inverewe Garden, Scottish Highlands. Will block A.I. slop & associated evangelists.
Poetry chapbooks 'Breathing Out Becomes White And Snowfall' & 'Who Am I Supposed To Be Driving?' out now.
Web: clarevobrien.weebly.com
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clareobrien.bsky.social
Haha!! Reminded me of this:
November 7, 2025 at 4:22 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Here's my #poem for the #poemsabout #lockeddoors prompt.
It's an #ekphrastic poem this time - at least, I'm not sure it works without my photo? I came across these stone dogs by chance & instantly wanted to write about them.
@thebrokenspine.co.uk @alanparrywriter.co.uk
#poetry #poetsofbluesky
Photo of two stone dogs either side of a locked black door in Dublin Street, Edinburgh The Dogs Of Dublin Street Edinburgh, 2025 by Clare O'Brien They’re silent in the warm dark, alert for a word or a whistle from one who remembers. Who made this memory of muscle, bone and fur, warm eager breath, wild energy waiting to spring? The black door’s shut against the lamplit night. Do those inside love these bright faces still? The dogs of Dublin Street wait in stone stillness, steadfast, vigilant, watching for a return.
November 7, 2025 at 10:24 AM
clareobrien.bsky.social
After several days of unrelenting rain I finally made it over to Inverewe Garden to see my Autumn #poem in situ in the Wet Garden! Check the alt text if you can't read it easily. Needless to say - the poem was written on a sunnier afternoon. 🌞
#poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #poetinresidence
POND LIFE by Clare O'Brien Light clings, a film of honey. The pool catches golden photons to digest. Around its weeded cauldron, trees stretch up for one last bite of sun. View of the wet garden at Inverewe View of the wet garden at Inverewe
November 6, 2025 at 4:57 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Didn't get as much reading done in October as usual. However: properly digested a collection of Seamus Heaney's I've had for some time, re-read Deborah Curtis's memoir of her tragically flawed husband Ian, and devoured another of Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden thrillers.
📚💙 #booksky
'District And Circle' by Seamus Heaney 'Touching From A Distance' by Deborah Curtis 'White Night' by Jim Butcher
November 1, 2025 at 1:05 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Up McCaig's Tower in Oban today.
Observed by crow and cat.
October 30, 2025 at 3:04 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
My contribution for #poemsabout #BurnForTheCamera was written shortly after the death by suicide of an old friend who was a performing artist. I was trying to understand the pressure performers are under - from fame, from fans, from the press.
@thebrokenspine.co.uk @alanparrywriter.co.uk
STARFUCKED by Clare O'Brien I was the creature on the spit. I danced in circles, oiled and appetising, steaming in the sweat and smoke. The people eyed the choicest cuts, salivated over biceps, triceps, pecs and abs. They licked their lips, imagining what still lay hidden. There wasn’t much, not after they’d sucked in the very breath of me. I was their oxygen. I pumped them up like flaccid tyres, sent them out again into the street sated and buoyant. I let them feed because I had no choice. I had been bred for this. Each day my flesh renewed. The show went on. And every night, I folded like a flower, pressed flat into a book. Only the shape of me remained. There should have been a climax. A real denouement, an exit with a bang. I should have left them blood and guts to take home in a bag. Denied that last late supper, they searched for what was left of me. There wasn’t much, a few lost chords, a note or two, an ageing body that had withered to a husk. They took away my skinny corpse and watched it burn. When that was gone, they raked through my ragged history and stuffed the ashes in their mouths. They stared into the light they stole, fixed in pixels on their little screens. They kept my head to illustrate their clotted tributes. They put it steaming on a plate, roasted to a turn. The words they wrote danced like Salome.
October 24, 2025 at 7:53 AM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Bit late to the party with this, work & family stuff has kept me from my writing lately! So #ImperfectMe is the ideal theme. This is a WIP, trying to get at how it feels when we isolate ourselves from what feels like an unfriendly world.
#poemsabout
@alanparrywriter.co.uk
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
LINES OF DEFENCE by Clare O'Brien My hide set hard. I’m fiercely solid, not a crack to betray my weakness, defences holding when the nightmares come. Nothing can break me, nothing shake my still resolve. My guards don’t sleep. Unblinking eyes patrol between the towers and the searchlights, looking for incursions. I find nothing. Nothing finds me.
October 10, 2025 at 3:33 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
September reading - a play based on a novel, a supernatural thriller set in Chicago, an Irish short story collection, a novel about a rare vinyl dealer and his highly unusual dog, and a history of Doctor Who.
📚💙 #booksky
Covers of: The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time by Simon Stephens Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher Every One Still Here by Liadan Ni Chuinn Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox Exterminate! Regenerate! by John Higgs
October 1, 2025 at 4:21 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Delighted to be part of today's launch of brand new Glasgow litjournal 'Sextet', with my flash 'Death Sentences' & poem 'Watching Gracie at TRNSMT'. This issue of the journal's tied to an exhibition in Glasgow's Six Foot Gallery, both of which have the theme Future/Past. [cont]
'Sextet' contributor list
September 30, 2025 at 10:14 AM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Delighted to have my poem 'tl:dr', which deals with the topics of phone addiction and invasive technology, included in this wonderfully varied new anthology!
Cover of '100 Poems For The 21st Century'
September 29, 2025 at 5:40 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Here'd something which might fit the #AMPHIBIAN #PoetryTheme ...? It's a poem I wrote for a multimedia exhibition at Inverewe Garden's Sawyer Gallery in 2024, while poet in residence.
Thanks to @thepaulconnolly.bsky.social for organising this!
September 29, 2025 at 3:23 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Just seen new ballet 'Mary Queen Of Scots' at Eden Court in Inverness. Scottish Ballet continues to innovate and amaze - what a terrific production this was. Dancing, staging, music, lighting & shadowplay contrinuted to a surreal sense of entering the minds of the characters. Immensely moving.
September 27, 2025 at 11:17 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Books finished in August were variously and beautifully deranged. One scurrilous exposé of the lunacy of privilege, an exploration of musical madness, a fantasy of witchcraft and divination, poetry exploring how landscape can disorder time, and a novel about schizophrenia.
📚💙 #booksky
'Entitled' by Andrew Lownie 'All The Madmen' by Clinton Heylin 'The Black Bird Oracle' by Deborah Harkness 'The Footing' by various poets, ed. Brian Lewis 'The Affirmation' by Christopher Priest
September 1, 2025 at 10:28 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
My husband just told me someone online said Nigel Farage looks like Parker from 'Thunderbirds' and now I can't think of him any other way. 😂
September 1, 2025 at 9:46 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Hi @hool415.bsky.social & #poetrycommunity
This is an unpublished something I've been messing about with for ages and I'm still not sure it works. Any suggestions welcome!
#promptcombo #winged
AERODYNAMICS by Clare O'Brien Ignoring booze and perfume, we pick up bars of chocolate and water for the plane. This temple’s god is wingless. He never boards a flight. We are captive audiences in airfield holding pens. Piped music pacifies the petrified departing, the notes thick with delay. We watch the rippling oracle: desperate for its prophecy, the number of our gate. We clutch our crumpled passes, hot tickets out of hell.
September 1, 2025 at 2:19 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Just been interviewed for our local paper the @gairlochtimes.org.uk about my poetry & work as poet in residence at Inverewe Garden in Poolewe, Wester Ross. Pardon wobbly phone scan from print copy!! Subscribe to the digital edition at gairlochtimes.org.uk for this and all the local news & views. 😀
RETRIEVING POEMS FROM THE UNDERWORLD CLARE O’BRIEN TALKS TO GINEVRA HOUSE ABOUT HER ROLE AS POET IN RESIDENCE AT INVEREWE GARDEN [page 1 - too long for alt text] RETRIEVING POEMS FROM THE UNDERWORLD CLARE O’BRIEN TALKS TO GINEVRA HOUSE ABOUT HER ROLE AS POET IN RESIDENCE AT INVEREWE GARDEN [page 2 - too long for alt text]
August 30, 2025 at 3:04 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Hi @rfsmith.bsky.social - here's my poem for this week's #promptcombo #banality - an everyday trip to the local swimming pool, which turned toxic! Appeared back in 2019 in 'The Anthology of Contemporary Gothic Verse' from @theemmapress.bsky.social
Evil Eye by Clare O'Brien Half way to the swimming pool I turned the car around. I told myself I'd forgotten my swim-cap and shampoo and my highlights would be ruined. And to be honest, I didn’t have the time. But really, it was you. I knew You'd be there, with your bony shoulders, Slow sidestroke, your parchment skin. I knew you wouldn't speak. But your cold eye Would overflow with thick white malice. You might be drifting through the water still. I drove back into the warm green world And left you there to steep. Perhaps the pool Will draw out all your poisons, Or better still, let you dissolve.
August 25, 2025 at 12:50 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
For the #promptcombo theme #woods I'd like to share my poem 'Dead Wood'. Published in Cosmic Daffodil Journal back in 2023, but inspired by a walk in the wake of a storm on the woodland trail at Inverewe Garden, where I'm currently Poet in Residence.
#poetrycommunity @victoriaspires.bsky.social
DEAD WOOD by Clare O’Brien Your split and splintered limbs Helpless, compound fractured, teeter in the wind’s last cruelty or float there, helpless in the flood. This winter storm has wrecked your wooden grace. It overruled your swaying summer compromises. Sap spills from amputated stumps. This row of corpses stiff with rigor lies ranked and ready for the saw. Your bones will feed the winter fires. Your wooden secrets crackle.
August 18, 2025 at 10:10 AM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Thanks John. The magazine actually illustrated it...
August 8, 2025 at 10:45 AM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Something a bit less serious from me today for #PoemsAbout #BlackSky. Published in Scottish free magazine 'Snack' back in 2019. Thanks as always to @alanparrywriter.co.uk
@thebrokenspine.co.uk for hosting!
Just Look Up By Clare O’Brien We had to guide the campers in with torches, their satnav having failed to find our code. They’d phoned three times, lost in the rural night though we were sure we’d written down the route. Next day they came and buzzed around our house, a cloud of midges seeking blood. They waved their iPhones in the air, each desperate for connection. In pity, I let them in to feed. They didn’t want our help, nor our advice, just our wifi password. Once logged in, they did not notice us. Their children loitered, poked the soggy undergrowth with sticks. They spent the summer evenings drunk on pixels, hovering beside our house, their thirsty screens like darting fireflies in the dark. The mountains brooded unremarked, the stars unseen. They were there at midnight, chattering ghosts outside our windows. Settlers under siege, we felt surrounded. Night had always been our curtain. We were helpless in their sights. Google maps led them astray. On bidding us goodbye, they said it was a shame they’d come so far, and never seen “the Skye”. We smiled. We could have told them; just look up
August 8, 2025 at 8:11 AM
clareobrien.bsky.social
My July reading was somewhat psychogeographical - London and its environs, the south coast, rural Cheshire.
Well, plus a crazy novel about necromancy in an alternative, magical Chicago. With dinosaurs.
📚💙 #booksky
'Bowieland' by Peter Carpenter 'Thursbitch' by Alan Garner 'The Beauty Things' by Alan Garner 'Dead Bet' by Jim Butcher 'The Last London' by Iain Sinclair
August 2, 2025 at 11:05 AM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Here's my contribution for this week's
#PoemsAbout #starcrossed - an old one, this, first published in the now-seemingly-and-sadly-defunct Cabinet of Heed.
#poetrycommunity
@alanparrywriter.co.uk
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
ROAD TRIP Remember? It was raining hard that night. The slow pulse of passing cars, alive in the wet light, drew liquid shapes on blacked-out windows; our sentences swam in an aquarium of air. New York was jumping but the traffic crawled. You stretched out, languid in the shadows. I kept my counsel as the hours flowed. Behind the glass the sky oozed darkness, bleeding like bruised fruit. Afterwards, awkwardly, we touched. I froze, But you melted me with a helpless shrug. On the glistening sidewalk, you turned to ask if you’d see me before I caught my plane. Your smile was sad. I’m here, you said.
August 1, 2025 at 9:38 AM
clareobrien.bsky.social
This is one of the traditional ways in which unwelcome people have been greeted in Scotland. 🤭
July 26, 2025 at 8:15 AM
clareobrien.bsky.social
Today's front page of Scottish newspaper @scotnational.bsky.social
Headline reads: "Convicted US felon to arrive in Scotland".
July 25, 2025 at 4:43 PM
clareobrien.bsky.social
If you're in Wester Ross in August, come to the launch party of our mythical magical new exhibition at the Sawyer Gallery at Inverewe Garden in Poolewe! Paintings, poetry, and much more. 9th August, 1pm.
#ScottishHighlands #art #poetry #mythology
Poster for Launch Party of 'Myths and Beasties' exhibition at Inverewe Garden.
July 24, 2025 at 6:56 PM