Yield

Shortlisted for the Rubery Book Awards 2021

Three definitions of the word Yield give meaning to the odyssey undergone in Claire Dyer’s third collection: a journey which sees a son become a daughter, and a mother a poet for both of them. Charting these transitions, the poems take us through territories known and familiar – landscapes of childhood, family and home – into further regions where inner lives alter, outer ones are reimagined.

Whether evoking clinic visits, throwing away old boyhood clothes, grieving over what’s lost, these honest and unashamed poems build to celebrate that place at the heart of motherhood where gender is no differentiator and love the gain.

''The actual things of the world are everywhere in Claire Dyer’s Yield – thick socks, Glenfiddich, bathrobes, Swarfega, Swedish Meatball Wraps – and in the spaces between move families, friends, lovers, their interrelations astutely picked out as the unsaid is made solid. But such rooted settings don’t prevent flight. Any poet who can end a poem with the lines “the bones in its spine small white discs of” or “Fuck the gob-lin. Rock it” has earned the right to our attention.'' ~ Matthew Caley

''There is so much that is uncompromising in Claire Dyer’s poems: the cruel precision of each word, line and image, and the sharply perfect intelligence of every metaphor and conceit. And yet Yield is a warm embrace of a book. A chronicle of love, generosity and ethics, Yield is a restorative piece of writing – a solace.'' ~ Kathryn Maris