E l e m e n t a l
£12.00
Elemental by Cliff Forshaw
Winner of the Templar Straid Collection Award
Elemental begins with a series of elegiac sonnets, moving from a mother’s death, through reflections on the stuff of the material world, to examine the rituals and language we use to deal with impermanence, fragility and loss.
Central sequences consider how we see the natural world through art, observation and myth and work variations on Japanese woodblock prints depicting the sights, smells and sounds of an ancient pilgrimage.
The final sequence - WRITTEN IN LIGHT - looks at old photographs of life in a Yorkshire market-town: people from various classes at work and play, their distinctive attitudes and dress. The book concludes with “Lanterns” and “Fade” which look at what, respectively, a Victorian painting and a twentieth-century film can tell us of what may be preserved against time.
Listen to poems from the collection below
Ash Dust Fade Junior Dictionary Remains
In Elemental, Forshaw has written poetry of strong durability and elegiac power, testing the resources of language in the face of absolute loss. The ubiquitous figure of the poet’s mother is ‘hallowed’ but ‘hollowed out’ in death, yet retrieved and vividly present, in poems that work wonders with the long reach of memory, the sonnet form and the nature of elegy itself, even as ‘the earth remains so cold and strange’.
David Wheatley
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Cliff Forshaw has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, twice a Hawthornden Writing Fellow, and held residences at Djerrassi, California, and in France, Kyrgizstan, Romania, and Tasmania. After various jobs in Spain, Mexico, Germany and New York, he wrote a doctorate on Renaissance Satire at Oxford and taught at several universities. Collections include: French Leave: versions and perversions (Broken Sleep, 2023); RE:VERB (Broken Sleep, 2022); Satyr (Shoestring, 2017); Pilgrim Tongues (Wrecking Ball, 2015); Vandemonian (Arc, 2013); Wake (Flarestack, 2009); Trans (The Collective Press, 2005). He is also a painter and translator.
