About Me


Photo: Helen Dewbery
I was born in Lincolnshire and now live in Gloucestershire. After giving up on writing for many years, I returned to poetry in 2009 and have since had poems published in a variety of magazines and on-line journals, including Iota, Anon, New WalkMagma, Tears in the Fence, Poetry Salzburg Review and Bare Fiction.

My pamphlet Gaud was one of the winners of the Flarestack Poets Pamphlet Competition in 2012 and is available to buy here. It went on to win the Michael Marks Award in 2013.


My first full collection, Arc, was published by Nine Arches Press in September 2015 and can be purchased here


My latest pamphlet, Scare Stories, was published by V Press in 2017 and can be purchased here.

I am currently working on a new collection for Nine Arches Press.

I have been blogging at A Thing For Poetry since 2012.


I have been invited to perform my work at Wenlock Poetry Festival, Birmingham Literature Festival, Buzzwords (Cheltenham), Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Cheltenham Literature Festival, Polari Literary Salon (South Bank Centre), the Poetry Café (London), Birmingham City University, Poetry Bites (Birmingham) and Swindon Poetry Festival, among others.

I have taught on-line for the Poetry School, have run workshops for Cheltenham Poetry Festival and other poetry events, and have worked as a poet in residence for the Stratford upon Avon Poetry Festival. I can be contacted at david_stgeorge[at]hotmail.co.uk to arrange workshops, tutoring, readings or residencies.


You can follow me on Twitter @davidcchelt



Praise for Gaud:

David Clarke’s exact, unsparing poems are executed with an eerie coolness.  His intriguing narratives have their own sensual music, as subtle as his rhymes.  Alison Brackenbury

In these poems the body is political space, tussled over by sharps, transvestites, revolutionaries, pornographers and lovers; and the landscape is a semiotic battlefield, from which this sharp-eyed reporter delivers his slant dispatches.  David Briggs

Praise for Arc:

His refined and elegantly playful poems mine popular and classical culture with equal aplomb. [...] Here is a subtle control of form, a distinctive voice, a lightly-worn erudition  Jonathan Edwards

Arc is a various, exciting and exhilarating debut collection. David Clarke has a knack for writing lines that take your breath away.  Cliff Yates

Arc contains poems in which the language of the world is returned to us with a lyric excitement. It’s a pleasure to read work as engaged and intelligent as this.  Rachael Boast

Daring, deft and full of restrained verve  Robert Peake

A selection of poems from Arc is available here:  http://ninearchespress.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/featured-poems-david-clarke.html

Praise for Scare Stories

What impressed me most about this collection were its delivery mechanisms. Not necessarily ‘what’ is said in the poems, but ‘how’ Clarke chooses to construct and present them. It’s a masterclass in how to embed more questions into the work. Fitting for the highly questionable circumstances we’re currently living in.
Heidi Williamson

With controlled nerve, [Clarke] offers a sequence of quick, dark bites, with glinting teeth.
Becky-Varley Winter
Scare Stories was a Poetry School 'Book of the Year' in 2017.