Carole Bromley 
Carole Bromley is married with four children and lives in York. Twice a winner in The Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition, she has two pamphlets with Smith/Doorstop (Unscheduled Halt, 2005, and Skylight, 2009). She has won a number of first prizes, including The Bridport and Yorkshire Open, and her poems have appeared in a range of magazines and anthologies. Carole is a graduate of the MPhil in writing at Glamorgan University and teaches Creative Writing for York University's Centre for Lifelong Learning.
Video of Carole being interviewed (YouTube)
A Jewsish Giant at Home With His Parents
after Diane Arbus
Ever wanted to eat your folks
like icing dolls off a wedding cake?
I could sweep them up like dust,
shake them onto the flower bed.
They keep the curtains closed all day
to stop the carpet fading;
they don’t like my nose, my hair,
my enormous feet.
Mum keeps a roomful of toys
as if I might regress,
looks up at me sometimes
like I’m some kind of ogre,
while dad stands, hands in pockets,
looking at his shoes,
diminished, defeated,
not knowing where to start.
I want to stretch out my arms
and shake the foundations,
stride off in my seven league boots
and find a ten foot woman.
– Carole Bromley, from Skylight (2009)
A Candle for Lesley
I lit a candle today, one of those night-lights
it’s difficult to get a flame going on.
Felt a fool but had to do it anyway,
having gone in. January, and the Minster
emptied of chairs, the nave an echoing expanse
where school parties were shepherded
from Rose Window to roof bosses upside down
in a mirrored trolley. The whole of the East end
was a mass of scaffolding, workmen taking out
panes, shouting down to one another as if
they were fitting PVC. And me,
in the middle of it all, thinking of you.
Not praying exactly for how could I in that place?
You might as well try to be alone with God
in Newgate market, or the fruit and veg aisle
in Tesco’s which was where I was standing
when you rang. You said you were not ready
and I said I should hope not, and afterwards
stood with my phone, my list, my half full basket.
A man reached across for bananas
while his wife steered round me and sighed.
Smith/Doorstop titles
Unscheduled Halt (2005)
Skylight (2009)
A Guided Tour of the Ice House (2011)
Reviews
‘Heartening and haunting’ – Michael Laskey
"I Love Carole Bromley's poems because they make me optimistic about growing older. The getting of wisdon, for Bromley, has not meant self-satisfaction or the blunting of perception: her poems are wry, funny, cleanly written, and, especially when their perspectives are long, startlingly fresh and new" - Kate Clanchy
Carole Bromley on her work
‘I like to imagine you there in your green shirt
lighting a cigarette, the quick, brave flare of it in the dark.’
I wrote my first poems for a dragon of an English teacher who didn’t think much of me and always gave me B+ so I stayed up all night writing a poem and finally got an A (It was about Russ Conway. You wouldn’t want to know...) She did introduce me to the poems of DH Lawrence, however. This was in a 60s grammar school. I went to 6 schools in all and at each an English teacher would hand out inky purple copies of his/her favourite poet. That’s how I met Larkin and also Milton and Wordsworth. I got to know them better at Reading University where I did a BA in English Literature with French and fell in love with Yeats and Baudelaire. I then got married, taught for a while, had four children, did an MA in Women’s Studies at York University and went back into teaching. I took my sixth formers on a number of Arvon weeks and wrote alongside them with some great poets, including Carol Ann Duffy and Don Paterson.
These days my favourite poets are many and varied. I admire Ashbery, Bishop, Frost, Hughes, Plath, Heaney but I also love Collins, Duffy, Armitage, O’Driscoll, Olds, O’Hara and William Carlos Williams. I learnt so much about line-endings from poems like The Red Wheelbarrow and so much about how to turn experience into poetry from lines like these:
‘Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.’
I usually write in the back room which is really a box room the youngest always had to make do with till someone moved out. Or mostly I sit there staring out of the window thinking how I really should be dusting the TV.
Putting together my first full-length collection, ‘A Guided Tour of the Ice House’ was a fairly long process. I began it on an MPhil at Glamorgan in 2001 and a few of the poems written at that time are included in it but mainly it was a case of gradually adding to the pool until I had enough strong poems to go for it. In the final stages I was helped by a year of mentoring with Mimi Khalvati funded by the Arvon/Jerwood scheme. It’s interesting to see how many of the poems in the collection started life in Poetry Business Writing Days or on various Arvon courses and retreats. Recently I have been visiting writers’ homes and this shows in a group of literary poems. The most recent is ‘A Haworth Triptych’ which contains two poems based on objects in Haworth Parsonage Museum. Unusually for me, I decided to use my notes to attempt a sonnet which seemed to fit the subject matter and this involved even more tinkering than usual until I was satisfied with the result.
I write about anything and everything: love, family, death, birth, paintings, books. I would like to write more poems about writers and definitely more poems in traditional form. I have nine grandchildren and often write for or about them. At the moment I am working on a poem about stained glass, one about my great-grandfather’s grave and a found poem based on Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals.
Publicity
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