Selected Poems

This new selection of the poetry of the acclaimed Cornish poet Jack Clemo includes work from all of his major volumes, from The Clay Verge in 1951 to 1995’s The Cured Arno. Awkward, radical, nature-baiting landscape poems full of pain and anguish give way to monologues, biographical sketches, broader themes and looser forms. The settings of white tips, flooded pits, and the grinding works of the industrial-rural clayscape are replaced by the rivers and bridges of Florence and Venice and the coastal ease of Dorset.

Jack Clemo was a British poet and writer whose physical sufferings—he became deaf about 1936 and blind in 1955—influenced his work. He was strongly associated both with his native Cornwall and his strong Christian belief. His work was considered to be visionary and inspired by the rugged Cornish landscape.