Clemo, Jack

Work From All Major Volumes

Selections range from Clemo’s The Clay Verge in 1951 to 1995’s The Cured Arno. Landscape poems full of pain 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. However, as Rowan Williams states in his introduction, ‘mellow is not the word’ for this transformation.