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RE:VERB
Friday, 6 May 2022 at 09:59

Another hiatus. I was back in hospital for an operation earlier in the year, and it's been a little difficult to get back into the swing of things. Time to kick-start the blog again, I think. Broken Sleep will be bringing out my narrative sequence about Rimbaud RE:VERB as a chapbook in in July and the editor Aaron Kent has been putting together the cover. The sequence is pretty well described by the blurbs from Carol Rumens and David Wheatley. I'll post more details and a fragment or two nearer the publication date.
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These poems reflect the fiercely independent spirt which characterised Arthur Rimbaud in all the phases of his short, turbulent life. In tightly- structured verse and vigorous, earthy diction, Cliff Forshaw lets the poet tell his own story, but in counterpoint with other voices and characters who see him through the filter of his masks as a merchant, explorer and ethnographer. Drawing on documents and letters, but wearing his research lightly, Forshaw unravels the poet’s tangled adventures in Africa, Asia and elsewhere with welcome incisiveness. His colourful poems of place and mood also illuminate Rimbaud’s inner life, and leave us with some intriguing clues as to why the brilliant poète maudit gave up his vocation and “donned the grotesque finery of trade”. CAROL RUMENS
Part translation, part verse biography, but entirely a law unto itself, Cliff Forshaw’s RE:VERB is a freewheeling jeu d’esprit, a cocktail of bad blood, ‘gloomy lust and sanctimonious doom’. Rampaging from the beatific, foul-mouthed teenaged poet to the fulminations of Une saison en enfer and the crucible of Africa, RE:VERB is a chasse spirituelle of sortilege and thaumaturgy, delivered with exquisite verve and oomph. Could Rimbaud read it himself, he would surely be moved to the same outburst he reserved for reminders of his own work – ‘Absurd, ridiculous, disgusting’. DAVID WHEATLEY
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