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WRITING
New Writing Website
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* * * New Release * * *
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For when words fail us | a small book of changes
Two strangers - a man and a woman - cross paths at an exhibition opening one snowy night in upstate New York. Neither of them intended being there; each had plans to attend a different event in the city that night. An unexpected blizzard blows in, disrupting rail services and causing mayhem across the region. As if in coordinated response to some ancient, pre-scripted prompt, they make their way to a small suburban gallery. There they embark on a conversation that will impact both their lives in ways neither of them could possibly have anticipated. A night like any other becomes a decade like no other. Criss-crossing between the US and Aotearoa New Zealand, Claire Beynon’s For when words fail us | a small book of changes is a spellbinding story of tenderness and obsession, art and the imagination, fracture and repair. Published by The Cuba Press || Poetry, Narrative verse, Creative Non-fiction | Released in November 2024 | Launched in Ōtepoti Dunedin, UNESCO City of Literature on 5 December 2024 |
Support for FOR WHEN WORDS FAIL US | A small Book of Changes:
I read the manuscript through in two sittings, walking by the river between. It's marvellous. A compelling story, its imagery translucent. The author lets the words work to make a shape that holds the world.
John Allison
I read the manuscript through in two sittings, walking by the river between. It's marvellous. A compelling story, its imagery translucent. The author lets the words work to make a shape that holds the world.
John Allison
For when words fail us is not a 'small' book. It's the length of a novel... Beynon is spot-on in her analysis of the changing moods of two people who are intimate.
Nicholas Reid | The New Zealand Listener, February 2025
Nicholas Reid | The New Zealand Listener, February 2025
Both fierce and gentle, these poems investigate the dialectic of living through the lens of a dramatic and exposing experience and are, unavoidably, an untangling of necessary things: attraction and repulsion at a molecular level; stories sometimes parallel, sometimes intersecting; the cerebral, corporeal and sensual self. Personal yet reaching beyond words on the page, this collection invites us into a deeply vulnerable space, bringing us to the brink and back.
A startling and unforgettable story.
Michelle Elvy
A startling and unforgettable story.
Michelle Elvy
A woman meets a man. With the language of a poet and the gaze of a painter, Claire Beynon explores the contradictions of the relationship that develops between these two strong, complex individuals. The hints of impending calamity grow more intense as the woman must struggle to safeguard the ground of her authenticity.
This is brave, angry, tender writing and always breathtakingly beautiful.
Carolyn McCurdie
This is brave, angry, tender writing and always breathtakingly beautiful.
Carolyn McCurdie
Claire Beynon's For when words fail us is a masterpiece. It's rare to read lines which play together like a symphony: compelling, whole and transformational. Claire's storytelling in poetry is as gripping as it is ultimately healing. There is space and light in the work as we move through relationship, trauma and the deep quiet places of forgiveness.
For when words fail us is starlight, sunlight, shadow and stone. It is the very best of art. It is what poetry at its most sublime can do: tell, heal, transform.
Kirstie McKinnon
For when words fail us is starlight, sunlight, shadow and stone. It is the very best of art. It is what poetry at its most sublime can do: tell, heal, transform.
Kirstie McKinnon
For when words fail us | a small book of changes || The process of making
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If the years
alter our capacities by increments and by grace our capacities alter our understandings Claire Beynon © |
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LINKS to NEW & RECENT WRITING:
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Poetry New Zealand 2022
Cumulus | An Anthology of skies | Edited by Kirstie McKinnon & Steve Smart | Caselberg Press 2023 Poetry for the Planet: An Anthology of Imagined Futures | Ed Julia Kaylock & Denise O'Hagan | Litoria Press, Australia, 2021 Twelve Poems About Ice | NZ Poetry Shelf | Curated by Paula Green Adapting to Crisis | Ten Notable Writers Talk with Penelope Todd | Down in Edin Magazine | Issue 24 | Dec 2021 Professor Bebop advises | Love in the Time of Covid | 2021 Shudder | Love in the Time of Covid | 2021 Coral Arranging | Flash Frontier | December 2021 Waiting for the New Song to Rise | A visual & written essay | Down in Edin Magazine | Issue 21 | July 2020 FIFTY-ONE | Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand | A Conversation with the Artist | WORD Christchurch |2020 Singing The Blues | Flash Frontier | In Conversation with Michelle Elvy | 2018 Many as One - A Global Honeycomb | Flash Frontier | 2019 Love | Flash Frontier | April Issue 2019 |
A selection of READINGS
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Getting to know you, Venice | A short story/poetry reading
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4.43AM, Venice
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Three poems
from For When Words Fail Us | A small Book of Changes |
OPEN BOOK | Poetry & Images
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Support for OPEN BOOK:
“Claire Beynon already has standing both as a poet and as a visual artist working in a variety of media. But she is rare in being one of the few able to bring their own words and images together in a striking and memorable way. If there is one word I would use for her work, it is 'innovation' and her new book has that in spades.” - Philip Temple “Here is a project that is adventurous in both conception and execution: the absence of pagination suggests one continuous page that will enchant the audience. In Claire Beynon’s OPEN BOOK the artifice of wit is set alongside (not against) the unsteady pressure of the personal. Here words are historical burs that, like the rough edges of lines made by an engraving tool, catch the world and turn it around. They enlarge our sense of what's possible. As she observes of earth and air: ‘Theirs is a relationship refined by this curiously lyrical insistence.’” - David Howard “This is poetry that is assured, confident and rich in imagery. It is poetry with a sense of both what is present, on the surface of things, and of what is imagined in undercurrents and layers. Claire’s writing has a lyrical, musical and sensory quality. She has an enviable ability to vividly recall and evoke place and sensations...” - Kay McKenzie Cooke “Poems to carve on the palm…” - Penelope Todd |
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A wall-mounted installation of the original pages for OPEN BOOK was a finalist in the 2005 National Wallace Art Awards and won the competition's Peoples' Choice Award.
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LITERARY CV
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TODAY'S SKY
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belongs to Tiepolo. A wisp of a man now with nicotine-stained teeth
and wine-soaked breath, he lives alone in a white house with blue windows and a wide view across the water. His angels of old have long since flown, yet still he paints and scumbles, fusses beneath his frescoed dome. Some mornings, a flock of whisper-thin sparrows hovers and on warmer days the bumblebees visit. He says it’s the blue they like which is reason enough to keep his windows open. Even when he forgets, the bumblebees find a crack and make their way in, stripe his house yellow and black. They don’t stay long, he insists, just long enough to tap dance on my walls and sills, resting awhile on my purple cushions and sometimes on the medieval throne in the hallway. Claire Beynon © [Winning poem, Takahē Monica Taylor Prize, 2021] |