The territory of Clare Shaw’s third collection isn’t one she chose herself, but one which chose her: the flooded valley and the ruined home. The 2015 floods in Britain left whole swathes of the country submerged, including her home town. Flood offers an eye-witness account of those events, from rainfall to rescue, but ripples out from there. Intimately interwoven with the breakdown of a relationship, flooding serves as a powerful metaphor for wider experiences of loss, destruction and recovery. Testifying equally to the forces that destroy us and save us, flood runs through the book in different forms – bereavement and trauma, the Savile scandal, life in an asylum. Yet ultimately, this is a story of one life as it is unravelled and rebuilt, written from the heart and from the North, in a language as dangerous and sustaining as water.
Circa l’autore
Clare Shaw was born in Burnley in 1972. Her 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’. Her third collection, Flood, is published by Bloodaxe in June 2018. She is a Royal Literary Fellow, and a regular tutor for the Writing Project, the Poetry School, the Wordsworth Trust and the Arvon Foundation. She also works as a mental health trainer and consultant and has taught and published widely in the field, including Our Encounters with Self-Injury (eds. Baker, Biley and Shaw, PCCS 2013) and Otis Doesn’t Scratch (PCCS 2015), a unique storybook resource for children who live with self-injury. Clare lives in Hebden Bridge with her daughter and their two pet rats; she enjoys rock climbing and wild swimming in cold and beautiful places.
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