Cliff Forshaw is a poet and painter. Educated by Catholic priests, he left school at sixteen and worked in an abattoir before studying painting at art college and developing an interest in languages and literatures, which he studied sporadically at Warwick, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, London where he took an MA with Distinction in Renaissance Studies.After working in Spain, Mexico, Italy, Germany, and New York, and freelance writing in London, he won a British Academy studentship to complete his doctorate at Wolfson College, Oxford with a thesis which explored classical and renaissance satire, and in particular the figure of the Elizabethan Malcontent Satyrist.Since then he has lived in Snowdonia, been prosody consultant for the OED, and taught at Bangor, Sheffield, and Hull University where he was Senior Lecturer in English. In 2017, he left to concentrate on writing and painting, and was awarded an honorary Senior Fellowship. He is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at York University.He has been writer-in-residence in France, Romania, Tasmania, Kyrgizstan and California, twice been a Hawthornden Writing Fellow, and won the Welsh Academi John Tripp Award. He has also been invited to read at various literary events in Brussels, Palo Alto, Dublin, Sydney, Iceland and Suceava (Romania). In 2016 he appeared at the XII International Festival of Poetry in Granada, Nicaragua.As founder member of the Humber Writers, he led and contributed poems, drawings and paintings to eight collaborative books and several exhibitions for the Humber Mouth and other literature festivals. He has also made three short- films: Drift (Humber Mouth Festival 2008); Under Travelling Skies, which won the first Larkin25 Words Award in 2012; and Slipway, which was commissioned by Wordquake and shown at the Beverley Literature Festival 2013. Other recent book collaborations to which Cliff has contributed poems, paintings and photographs include: Incoming (Humber Mouth Festival 2014); Sketches, Dispatches, Hull Tales and Ballads (Kingston Press / Humber Mouth Festival 2012); Postcards from Hull (Humber Mouth Festival 2011); Hide (Far Ings Nature Reserve / Humber Mouth Festival 2010); Architexts (Humber Mouth Festival 2007).
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
The high energy of Cliff Forshaw's poems makes me think
particularly of John Donne And the other Metaphysicals: argument,
wit, erudition and force of feeling all working to convey an
authentic vision of the world we live in. - Christopher Reid
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