Launch reading by Jo Clement, Sarah Wimbush and Clare Shaw
Bloodaxe's joint launch reading by Jo Clement, Sarah Wimbush and Clare Shaw celebrating the publication of their new poetry collections was live-streamed on 31 May 2022, and is now on YouTube. They were reading from and discussing their new collections with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, and with each other. All three poets have won Northern Writers' Awards for poems included in these collections.
Jo Clement read first in each set, followed by Sarah Wimbush. They were reading from their first full collections Outlandish and Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands. Clare Shaw was reading from their fourth collection, Towards a General Theory of Love. Passionate, mesmerising readings from all three poets, followed by a wonderful discussion during which they drew out the connections between their three books.
Watch this wonderful event via the video below or on YouTube via this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTbzIyb-eag
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links. If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
Jo Clement: Outlandish
UK: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/outlandish-1297
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/outlandish/
Sarah Wimbush: Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands
UK: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/shelling-peas-with-my-grandmother-in-the-gorgiolands-1296
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/ shelling-peas-with-my-grandmother-in-the-gorgiolands/
Clare Shaw: Towards a General Theory of Love
UK: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/towards-a-general-theory-of-love-1298
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/towards-a-general-theory-of-love/
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Jo Clement: Outlandish
Jo Clement's first collection confronts Romantic impressions of British Gypsy ethnicity and lyrically lays them to rest. From Wordsworth to Top Gear, her poems invite us to consider notions of otherness, trespass and craft. She steps between ancient stopping places and mardy council estates to trill elegiac Romanes, English, and birdsong about witches, wild camping and Silver Cross prams. Compelled by a brutal Gypsy, Roma and Traveller diasporic legacy, Outlandish tenderly praises the poem-as-protest and illuminates a hidden and threatened culture.
Jo Clement was born in Darlington in 1986. She received a Northern Writers’ Award in 2012. She is Editor of Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine, and founded the imprint Wagtail with support from the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC). In 2021 Butcher’s Dog published Wagtail: The Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology, edited by her. She was awarded an inaugural AHRC Northern Bridge scholarship for her PhD in Creative Writing from Newcastle University. She is now a Creative Writing Lecturer at Northumbria University, and lives in North Shields. Her first book-length collection, Outlandish, is published by Bloodaxe Books in May 2022.
Sarah Wimbush: Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands
In Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands Sarah Wimbush journeys through myth and memory with poetry rooted in Yorkshire. From fireside tales of Romany Gypsies and Travellers, through pit villages and the haunt of the Miners’ Strike, to the subliminal of the everyday – including poems about typists, pencil sharpeners and learning to drive in a Ford Capri. This highly accomplished debut collection explores what it means to belong, what it means to be on the margins. This is poetry written in praise of family and community and those qualities which make us human: love, language and, most of all, resilience.
Sarah Wimbush is a Leeds poet who hails from Doncaster. She has published two pamphlets: Bloodlines (Seren, 2020), winner of the Mslexia/PBS Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2019, which was also shortlisted in the Michael Marks Awards, and The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith|Doorstop, 2021), a winner of the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition in 2020. Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands is her first book-length collection.
Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands is Atrium's featured book for May/June 2022. Read four poems from the collection on Atrium Poetry here.
Clare Shaw: Towards a General Theory of Love
Clare Shaw’s fourth collection Towards a General Theory of Love shows that poetry can say as much as about who we are – and especially how we feel – as psychology. They also feed each other. Harry Harlow’s famous experiments on baby monkeys changed the course of psychology. They proved that we need care, contact and love – and they inflicted profound and lasting suffering on their subjects. Clare Shaw’s poems in Towards a General Theory of Love are driven by the same furious need to understand the experience of love and its absence. Harlow’s findings, attachment theory, mythology and art are set alongside stories of attraction, grief and desire. The book is inhabited by the character of Monkey, who shows by example how early attachments and trauma may shape us, but how ultimately the individual – like the reader – will come to realise her, his or their own general theory and practice of love.
Clare Shaw was born in Burnley in 1972. Their debut Straight Ahead (Bloodaxe Books, 2006) was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award for Poetry and attracted a Forward Prize Highly Commended for Best Single Poem. This was followed by Head On (2012); 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 consultant, and lives in Hebden Bridge.
[15 November 2022]
