Bloodaxe Books | Clare Shaw at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023 @BloodaxeBooks | Uploaded August 2023 | Updated October 2024, 2 hours ago.
Clare Shaw was born in Burnley in 1972. Their first two collections with Bloodaxe were Straight Ahead (2006), which was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award for Poetry and attracted a Forward Prize Highly Commended for Best Single Poem, and Head On (2012), which according to the Times Literary Supplement is 'fierce, memorable and visceral'. Their later collections are Flood (2018), a New Writing North Read Regional title in 2019, and Towards a General Theory of Love (2022), written after winning a Northern Writers' Award. Clare is co-director of Kendal Poetry Festival, a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, and a regular tutor for the Writing Project, the Poetry School, Wordsworth Grasmere and Arvon. Clare also works as a mental health trainer and has taught and published widely in the field.
In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Clare begins with ‘My father was no ordinary man’ from FLOOD (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/flood-1187). Clare then reads a selection of poems from TOWARDS A GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/towards-a-general-theory-of-love-1298): ‘Monkey Writes a Poem About His Mother’, ‘Rhosymedre: Prelude on a Welsh Hymn’, ‘Monkey and I Discuss the Difficulty of Working Therapeutically with Non-verbal Traumatic Memories’, ‘Monkey Joins a Dating App’, ‘Monkey Reads William Blake’ and ’Child Protection Policy’. Clare ends the reading with ‘Who knows what it’s like’, from Flood.
Clare Shaw was born in Burnley in 1972. Their first two collections with Bloodaxe were Straight Ahead (2006), which was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award for Poetry and attracted a Forward Prize Highly Commended for Best Single Poem, and Head On (2012), which according to the Times Literary Supplement is 'fierce, memorable and visceral'. Their later collections are Flood (2018), a New Writing North Read Regional title in 2019, and Towards a General Theory of Love (2022), written after winning a Northern Writers' Award. Clare is co-director of Kendal Poetry Festival, a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, and a regular tutor for the Writing Project, the Poetry School, Wordsworth Grasmere and Arvon. Clare also works as a mental health trainer and has taught and published widely in the field.
In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Clare begins with ‘My father was no ordinary man’ from FLOOD (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/flood-1187). Clare then reads a selection of poems from TOWARDS A GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/towards-a-general-theory-of-love-1298): ‘Monkey Writes a Poem About His Mother’, ‘Rhosymedre: Prelude on a Welsh Hymn’, ‘Monkey and I Discuss the Difficulty of Working Therapeutically with Non-verbal Traumatic Memories’, ‘Monkey Joins a Dating App’, ‘Monkey Reads William Blake’ and ’Child Protection Policy’. Clare ends the reading with ‘Who knows what it’s like’, from Flood.
