Several longish fragments of my satire Hole have appeared in About Larkin - Journal of The Philip Larkin Society (No. 53. April 2022). The poem features Larkin as a Dante-figure leading the poet through a contemporary Hell. The fragments are accompanied by my paintings of Larkin, who famously hated what he called "the myth-kitty", guiding his bicycle through various mythic landcapes. These paintings feature elsewhere on the blog in the Larkinland section.

The full poem appeared on The Common website several years ago, around the time Hull was gearing up to be City of Culture. Unfortunately that on-line version didn't manage to preserve the formatting of the finale, and so I'm please to see the formatting restored to this print version. Here's a glimpse of the last page. The full poem (with different paintings)  is accessible here: http://www.thecommononline.org/features/march-2016-poetry-feature

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

Happy New Year!

I'm easing myself into 2022 slowly by revisiting this painting. Not sure if I prefer this version to the original at the moment. I'll put up a bigger version, together with the earlier version in the Public Spaces painting portfolio for the moment.

Much still to tidy up from the last year - and the one before that - before committing to new projects. I'm back in hospital this week for another operation, cancer threatening to colonise colon this time. I'm still pretty weak from the last round of surgery, radio and chemo. I also still have a feeding tube, though I am eating a little most days, though I have very little saliva production and find a lot of things I used to love to eat really difficult now. Surgery will probably knock me back a little, but it is a salutary reminder to get on with stuff. My New Year's resolution is to go easy on the morphine this time. Anyway, the booze still works - though it's always a balance between wetting the whistle now and getting a much drier mouth. It's all pretty tiring: lymphodema seems to have made it difficult to breathe easily - and the dry mouth means frequently waking up through the night, but that said this is preferable to the alternative - and there really isn't any alternative.

I wouldn't quite say I was glad to see the back of 2021. A bugger of a year for us all, and a lot of hospital time for me, but it did put things in perspective and that helped get things done, or helped just enjoying not bothering with stuff I didn't really care about.

Much to do in 2022! Have a good one!

My article on some of the connections between my poetry and painting "Ut pictura poesis: as in painting so in poetry" has just appeared on the Showcase pages of the Royal Literary Fund website.

Click on the link below to read: https://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/ut-pictura-poesis/

The article is illustrated by this older version of my painting of a cyclist on the campus at York University. Over the last few days I decided to return to this painting and I'll post the latest version in a day or two

View from Concourse over King's Cross Station. Size: 102 x 127 cm. Medium: oil on canvas. Date: 2019-2021

 

Over the late summer, I revisited the large painting of King's Cross which I started a couple of years back. Lockdown and illness intervened, but I'm glad I went back to it. This time I decided I wanted to make more of individuals in the crowd, and putting together this composite crowd from scores of drawings and photographs was absorbing though time-consuming. The focus is less on the architecture now as the picture seems to have developed something of Brughel's busy scenes about it. I'm thinking now about further ways to depict crowds, though probably with fewer highly-delineated figures; maybe something that catches mass movement.

When time permits I hope to be in a position to update my blog.