My new collection Elemental, which won the Straid Collection Prize in 2023, has just appeared from Templar.

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

Lyrebird

"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

"Elemental is full of the old energy, undiminished. Forshaw is on top form, mixing elegy and satire, fury and sadness, dandyish wit and plain speaking about the less comfortable truths, to great effect. It could be his most Baudelairean book yet."

Christopher Reid

As the Donald assumes power once again, in place of an effective malediction, I offer this hopeless little prayer. It has appeared previously, but seems worth reposting.

Click on the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2mCj16b9SQ

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In Winter

after the German of Georg Trakl “Im Winter”

 

This field now glows, so cold, so white.

The sky, so vastly lonely, stark

as hunters return from the woods’ deep dark

and jackdaws dart by the pond’s blue light.

 

The forests seem to keep their silence,

glimpsed fires flecking woodlanders’ huts.

You hear a sleigh, off in the distance,

as that grey moon first starts to cut

 

above where a deer now bleeds to death

and ravens share their dirty joke.

Reeds tremble. All else must hold its breath.

A footstep. First all is frost. Then smoke.

Cliff reads "Available Light" on Poetry Archive Worldview 2024.

Click on the link below. There are two further videos of Cliff reading poems here.

Available Light by Cliff Forshaw - YouTube

Lyrebird by Cliff Forshaw (youtube.com)

Loop by Cliff Forshaw (youtube.com)

 

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Available Light

(any source of light not explicitly supplied by the photographer)

“Où sont les neiges d’Antan?”(Where are the snows of yesteryear?) François Villon (1431-63)

“Not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” Bob Dylan

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When snow falls blue against the dying light,

then maybe what you see and what you get’s

both somehow wrong, yet somehow oddly right.

Ashamed that you kept on hedging all your bets,

but finally the light begins to fade.

It’s getting late. I’d say, it’s almost night.

 

And now? — These past few years lived in the shade

of all that busy stuff that went before.

Who knows quite when or why (and how much longer?)

all that history you can’t quite remember.

The blue is darkening, and now the snow,

and yet… and yet… And God knows why, despite,

or perhaps because of all that blue, you know,

that you can only shoot through available light.

 

 

 

 

A few of my recent life drawings, along with others by colleagues, are in this exhibition at Juice in Hull.

For more life studies, please see the relevant portfolio pages.

 

 

 

 

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It's some time since I posted anything on the blog. Winter called for hibernation this year. I gave up my Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at the end of last academic year, and have been busy writing over the winter. Funny how the seasons affect what we work on and and how much. This year I've done no painting and little drawing. There are, however, a few new literary things in the pipeline which I hope to be able to mention in the next few days. Meanwhile, here's a photo I recently took during a fine holiday in Copenhagen.

My poem "Toad" was Carol Rumens's choice for a recent Guardian Poem of the Week (16th October 2023). The poem is a version of a French poem by Tristan Corbière (1845-75), and appeared in my most recent collection French Leave: versions and perversions (Broken Sleep, 2023). Click on the link for the poem and Carol's discussion.

Poem of the week: Toad by Cliff Forshaw Poetry The Guardian