This brief handbook, subtitled ‘Study and Colloquy’, is a model introductory
volume for anyone interested in Clemo’s
poetry or anyone who wants to begin finding their way around his work
intelligently. Brian Louis Pearce provides a guide to the figures
who inhabit Clemo’s monologues, a useful introductory survey of his work
and several fascinating autobiographical fragments from letters between
them, dating from the period 1989-1992. The ‘colloquy’ or conversation
of the subtitle is then enacted within fourteen of Pearce’s own poems,
mostly about Clemo and his landscapes, and a concluding essay, ‘Thoughts
on Being a Nonconformist Aesthete’, of which more later.
Blind and deaf before the age of forty, Clemo
still managed to produce several volumes of visionary religious poetry,
much of it about his native Cornish claypit
landscapes, and volumes of
fiction and autobiography, notably The
Marriage of a Rebel (1980). His strongest individual volumes (as
Pearce agrees) are probably
The Echoing Tip (1971) and the volume which followed, 1975’s Broad
Autumn, but the easiest way to begin reading his oeuvre is to
seek out Bloodaxe’s Selected
Poems, published in 1988.
Clemo’s poetry can be craggy, unfriendly
and difficult to navigate at times, but it is worth persevering with:
he is a notably clear writer, and the best of his work is often to
be found in the monologues sprinkled throughout his volumes which
reveal his love of ( and debt to ) Browning. They throng with other
literary and artistic figures, too, and the new reader might like
to begin with ‘Max Gate’ (Hardy), ‘William Blake Notes a Demonstration’
or ‘Alfred Wallis’, all of which are in the Bloodaxe volume mentioned.
Pearce’s concluding essay, ‘Thoughts on Being a Nonconformist Aesthete’,
originally published back in the early 1990s in the Reformed Quarterly, is a thought-provoking document in its own right,
sketching out the constricting trials and tribulations of those like
Clemo (and Pearce himself): ‘the temptation remains: to jot
the poem in secret, in the back pew, and to keep the Bible out of
sight in one’s work as well as when out in ‘the world’. For me, this
reanimated the unease I have felt in the past when appending scriptural
verses to my poems (initially to aid interpretation). Why should the
feeling persist? Because, for God’s sake, above anything else, let
no one presume to think that we are preaching!
Anyway : if you’re at all interested in Clemo, you’ll enjoy this brief guide to his work. It also
includes a handful of black-and-white photographs in which he disconcertingly
resembles John Cale’s grandfather.
© M C Caseley 2002
