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Historians, anthropologists, and scientists of different disciplines have catalogued human life and culture in all its iterations so we can, as a people, understand what we have experienced and what we can yet achieve. There are significant gaps in our knowledge, however: what was life like before written records? 

“Neolithic Imaginings: Mythic Explorations of the Unknown” is a poetic collection by Loralee Clark, published in April 2026 by Kelsay Books. The poetry collection examines fifteen different Neolithic monuments (henges, a crannog, dolmens, sepulchers, and a menhir) across England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Each poem explores different spiritual, mechanical, ceremonial, and landscape questions in connection to different cultures, new agricultural practices, and livestock husbandry occurring at the time. The poems paint pictures of humans as an ecotone of the landscapes in which they chose to settle.

Sample Poems:

Long Meg and Her Daughters: A Final Cup and Rings

Speak Thou, whose massy strength and stature scorn
The power of years—pre-eminent, and placed
Apart, to overlook the circle vast.
Speak, Giant-mother!	--“The Monument Commonly Called Long Meg and Her Daughters, William Wordsworth, 1833

i.
The largest stone now carved:
three concentric circles of sun and moon, 
cup and ring like mother and child,
death in the fire and flood,
constant winter and spring.
Birth of another mirror for the sky.

Chips of her we place into small woven pouches; 
we find a tree with a wound, fingers prying off its tacky blood,
push the shards of stone into the resin and shape  
small moons: waning, waxing, full.  New, rubbed with ash, 
darker than the others.  All placed back into the pouches
and we carry her with us through generations.

In other lifetimes she will become a coarse, petrified giantess,
a woman who profaned the preferred religion at the time,
branded a witch, her whole coven cast into stone.  
A fossilized wedding party given to sin.

ii.
Are the stones the same number? Count them clockwise 
and widdershins—they began as seventy-seven but time 
has buried some, felled others, and the two cairn alters 
that stood in the circle have long crumbled.  Count them, 
but be careful.  Are there fifty-nine backward and
forward?  If the number is wrong you could be reduced to a pebble, 
carried in a woven pouch because the time for chipping has passed; 
harm the tall, thin woman and you unleash harsh storms, poor 
harvests and she will bleed, same as any living creature.  
You will bleed with her.

~~

Loch an Duin (dween) Crannog, Scotland

We peregrinate for days to reach the island;
while henge ditches contain water, sanctifying
cup and ring, rain doesn’t hold the same power
as the loch.  Our hearts uncertain and humble, 
we carry our drinking bowls, dirt and sweat
staining them, readying them 
for scrying the sweet, salvific waters.

After we settle, the food is prepared, eaten, 
the mead emptied from our bowls, replaced 
with river’s surface, our fingerprints, stars and moon 
shining up from between our hands.

Now is the moment our voices open,
bless our bodies, use our eyes and minds to see 
into the wisdom of tomorrows 
dancing between the water and moon.

Later, as our eyes stare overhead
slipping with sleep, the stars’ plow
promises a fertile harvest.
Some of us offer loch the hours of 
hands shaping clay, meditative mark making,
fire’s work of heat and hardening,
letting the bowls slip away in the stream.

Crickets and corncrakes lullaby us through the night.

Reviews:

How we long to be remembered–our loves, our deeds, our fears, our desires. In Neolithic Imaginings, Loralee Clark explores our yearnings–the “stitch in the web of us”–through the epic lens of megalithic structures erected 11,00-7,000 years ago. She moves nimbly across time and place–from Turkey to Orkney. This collection of confident and expansive poems is deeply researched and delightfully infused with myth, fable and imagination. With a psalm-like quality, Clark explores our shared human concerns over millennia–the wonder of the stars, our desire to sustain our earth, our fear of suffering, our quest for love; “People who shaped their bodies as songs to be sung together”. The imagined details of custom, ceremony and liturgy are lovingly rendered; “You listen to the haw, tip its waxy berries into the pots to grind and cook later; sweet drink during winter.” She invites us to consider how we make meaning in our own lives through rituals of relationships, transition, age and season, and what are the stones we slab, carry, stack and carve in the hope of understanding what lies beyond us, of being spared from misfortune, and maybe even of being remembered. “Time, that cyclical ancestor is like a snake’s skin, is a slow-motion deep dance affording the stones’ wiser agency.” In the authoritative and tender hands of Clark, we take a memorable and wise journey through the history of man that feels monolithic and yet intimate, as if we have taken a seat by the fire with our Neolithic ancestors.

— Ann Chinnis, Pushcart Prize recipient, 2025, author of Poppet, My Poppet and I Can Catch Anything

~~

Neolithic Imaginings: Mythic Explorations of the Unknown is a captivating excavation of our ancestors’ relationship to each other, to the earth, and to the endless above. Through vivid imagery, Loralee Clark guides the reader on a journey to ancient sacred sites where people map[ped] the perpetual cycles of sky, studied the connections between themselves and the land, the sun’s seasons, the stars’ language and the moon’s time.  She draws a through-line between the loss of past communal practices and our current epidemic of loneliness. With hope that we might listen again to the plants, relearn their lessons of trust, diversity, [and] co-existence, Clark proposes a more purposeful path—one that leaves humanity less lonely and adrift.

— Teresa Burns Murphy, author of The Secret to Flying

~~

As the title suggests, the poems in Loralee Clark’s chapbook, Neolithic Imaginings: Mythic Explorations of the Unknown, guide us through an excavation of ancient monuments to discover the wisdom that’s buried there. With an archeologist’s delicate hand and eye, Clark unearths the magic of stones, plumbs the starry depths and even the spaces between all things. She entreats us to listen to the endless singing of the sky, the stolid stones who speak the language of permanence, the vast circles and rings that shape all of creation. These enchanting poems call us to imagine ourselves… in the time when the stars themselves kissed the ground, pushing chaos into becoming. With evocative imagery and a voice often haunted and mystical, she summons the engineers, alchemists and mystics to propel us to the places where neolithic memories are embedded and with them the knowledge that everything is alive – songs of a stone, voice of a stag’s horn, trees and even time itself, all nested in intimate connection.

— Thayer Cory, author of Carried and Cracked Open

Book Review:

https://dawnreviewsbooks.blogspot.com/2026/04/secrets-of-stones-neolithic-imaginings.html

To Purchase:

https://kelsaybooks.com/products/neolithic-imaginings-mythic-explorations-of-the-unknown

About the Author:

Loralee Clark is a writer who grew up learning a love for nature and her place in it, in Maine.  She resides in Virginia now as a writer and artist, with two awesome kids and a loving husband.  She writes poetry and non-fiction.  Myth is her love language.  Clark has been nominated for three 2026 Pushcart Prizes.  You can learn more about her at sites.google.com/view/loraleeclark. Her Substack, which focuses on the process of creativity, is nosuchthingasfailure.substack.com.