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last update:
 
1 Jul23

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Cliff Forshaw interview
by Francis H Powell

poetry favourites:
The Common: Cliff’s Dantean satire: Hole
 
Shadows in the Scrub – ABC Radio, the Tasmanian Tiger
 
Zone Poetry – Borsec artists’ residency, Transylvania
 
The Guardian: Carol Rumens on ‘Loop’

and in the shop…
collections –
 
“French Leave”
and
“RE:VERB”
Broken Sleep Books;
 
“Satyr”
Shoestring Press;
 
“Pilgrim Tongues”
Wrecking Ball Press;
 
“Vandemonian”
Arc Publications
 
“Trans”
The Collective Press
 

 

 

Cliff Forshaw is a poet and painter. His latest collection, French Leave: versions and perversions (Broken Sleep, 2023), plays variations on the themes and forms of French verse from mid-nineteenth century Gautier and Gérard de Nerval, through Baudelaire and Rimbaud, to Valéry and Apollinaire on the eve of the First World War. In RE:VERB (Broken Sleep, 2022), Cliff recreates Rimbaud’s terrestrial adventures from the Hooligan Poet and Seer in bohemian Paris, through the years as a tough merchant and gun-runner in Africa, to his death aged thirty-seven in a Marseilles hospital.
 
Previous publications include Satyr (Shoestring, 2017) in which an Elizabethan Malcontent Satyrist returns from the dead to appraise the contemporary world, and Pilgrim Tongues (Wrecking Ball, 2015) which travels from Hull to Vietnam and back, by way of Israel, Transylvania, California and Cambodia, continuing the voyages he embarked upon in Wake (Flarestack Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2009).
 
Cliff’s collections include Vandemonian (Arc, 2013), which focuses on Van Diemen’s land and its inhabitants – human and animal, newcomer and Aborigine – to piece together a fragmentary history of Tasmania and Trans (The Collective Press, Wales, 2005) which culminates in a rewriting of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
 
Cliff has been: writer-in-residence in France, Romania, Tasmania and Kyrgizstan; a Djerassi Resident Artist in California; twice a Hawthornden Writing Fellow; winner of the Welsh Academi John Tripp Award; and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at York and Hull universities. In 2016 he appeared at the XII International Festival of Poetry in Granada, Nicaragua.
 
He has made three short films: Drift (Humber Mouth Festival 2008); Under Travelling Skies, (Larkin25 Words Award Winner, 2012); and Slipway, (Wordquake / Beverley Literature Festival, 2013). Hole, Cliff’s satirical epic in which Philip Larkin leads us through a Dantean Hell (in search of Hull) also features several of his paintings: The Common online feature.
 
Reviews and comments:
 
on Pilgrim Tongues:
 

The high energy of Cliff Forshaw’s poems makes me think particularly of Donne and the other Metaphysicals: argument, wit, erudition and force of feeling all working to convey an authentic vision of the world we live in.

 

Christopher Reid

 
 

These are poems captained by a large intelligence and abundant lexical vigour, poems of voyage, exertion and discovery. They enjoy the challenge of unpredictable and unusual locations, geographical and psychological. At the same time, they demonstrate grounded, dependable craft. They never trick the reader, but, witty and exuberant, send us on our poetic journeys with new imaginative maps.

 

Carol Rumens

 
 

Cliff Forshaw is a poet of rooted non-attachments, a nomad of the suburbs and a boulevardier of the wild places. As maps go, Pilgrim Tongues is the one that will get you lost, but you’ll thank its author for it, later, or maybe even at the time.

 

David Wheatley

 
 

The voice here is distinctive and mercurial – cool, intelligent yet engaged – the spirit of Larkin, perhaps, re-emerging, muscular and revitalised, in the 21st century.

 

Flarestack Prize judges

 
 

a dizzying, noisy world tour viewed through the prism of classical learning and told with dazzling accomplishment and technique. With a voice that is frank and inquisitive, the poet tackles complex themes and ideas with enviable accessibility and wit … a rich, densely populated collection that speaks to the mind and the ear. It is multilingual and peripatetic in its concerns and always open to the strange and new. Above all this collection is characterised by an iridescent lyricism.

 

Christopher James in Iota 95

 
 

on Vandemonian:
 

a humanist vision of nightmare handled with great wit and linguistic exuberance, erudition brought to life with the full force of feeling. A remarkable and somewhat shaming read.

 

William Bedford in The Warwick Review

 
 

a thrilling, fascinating collection of poems; read it in one sitting for the most intense experience of the voyage.

 

Kay Syrad in Envoi

 
 

One of the striking dimensions of Forshaw’s book is that, whilst acknowledging his source material, he writes in a manner that seamlessly and organically presents themes, subject matter and historical detail in an original fusion that communicates a fascinating story of cultural collision […] a finely fettled piece of poetic art.

 

Michael Woods in Iota

 
 

on the Ned Kelly Hymnal section:
 

The ‘Hymnal’ poem achieves real dignity out of its mix of filmic, modernist detail and grave statement.

 

Ken Bolton in Jacket

 
 

on Trans
 

What do you look for in a book of new poems? A voice like no other, incisive, musical? An imagination like no other trans-forming the world you thought you knew? A word-hoard deep enough for the demands of a big spender? Look and listen here.

 

Jon Stallworthy

 
 

constant flashes and sparkles of real wit … Trans is one of the most original collections I’ve read in a long time.

 

David Kennedy, co-editor The New Poetry

 
 

electrifying verse and swaggering craft… the tumbling diction is typical of Forshaw who has an exceptional ear… be grateful for such an electrifying vision conveyed so urbanely.

 

Will Daunt, Envoi

 
 

Like Ovid, Forshaw has real wit as a poet… this is the work of a poet skilled in his art.

 

Michael Nobbs: a review from GWales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.