Chloé Eathorne

Hailing from Redruth, Cornish poet and soundscape artist Chloé Eathorne’s passion for poetry was sparked by Philip Larkin, with the final line of his ‘An Arundel Tomb’ striking her particularly hard. ‘That line stayed with me long after I closed the book,’ she says, ‘it was the first time I realised how a handful of words could hold centuries of history, human frailty, and tenderness all at once’.

As someone living with a chronic illness Eathorne was drawn to poetry ‘as a way of exploring the relationship between the land and the body’. Taking inspiration from the local landscape, she is ‘drawn to texture, to the rust and resilience that lies beneath the polished surfaces tourists see’, and she loves how poetry helps her ‘to seek out and continuously re-discover the wonder of the everyday’. Eathorne also sees the Cornish landscape ‘layered with industrial heritage and mining scars’ as mirroring ‘the unseen depths of living with an ‘invisible’ illness’. 

‘As a working-class poet, I feel compelled to write about what endures, what is worn and weathered, and the quiet strength that persists. Poetry for me, gives form to these hidden histories.’

Among her influences are ‘poets of place’, ‘artists who explore their environment with honesty and texture, who dig beneath the surface to reveal both beauty and resilience’. These include Alice Oswald, Aaron Kent, Ella Frears, Isabel Galleymore and Irene Solà, and also Jack Clemo whose ‘writing about the Cornwall clay country, its industrial landscape and spiritual starkness, and the tension between human activity and the natural world resonates deeply’. 

Since completing her MA in Professional Writing at Falmouth University, Eathorne has been profiled as BBC Radio Devon and Cornwall’s Creative of the Week and selected for Hypatia Trust’s Women in Word Festival; her poetry is included in Modern Poetries 1: Cornish Modern Poetries. She sees A Poet in Every Port as ‘an opportunity to engage with the local community and celebrate the unique rhythms of the place we inhabit’, and is proud to be representing Cornwall, ‘a place that can often feel disconnected from a lot of UK poetry events’.