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By Cliff Forshaw

Pilgrim Tongues

Dense, rich and satisfyingly complex, this collection draws on a fertile heritage of myth and legend, evoking lands long forgotten and landscapes rendered new by this most modern and lyrical of voices.

£8.95

Poetry

Product Description

Pilgrim Tongues travels from Hull to Vietnam and back, by way of Israel, Transylvania, California and Cambodia, continuing the yoyages Cliff Forshaw embarked on in Wake (Flarestack Poetry Competition Prize 2009)

“The high energy of Cliff Forshaw’s poems makes me think particularly of 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

 “As always, Cliff Forshaw’s writing embodies a large intelligence. These are poems of voyage, exertion and discovery, enjoying the challenge of unpredictable and unusual locations, both geographical and psychological. At the same time, they demonstrate grounded,  dependable craft. They never trick the reader, but, witty and exuberant, send us on our poetic journeys with new imaginative maps.” Carol Rumens

 “Cliff Forshaw is a poet of rooted non-attachments, a nomad of the suburbs and a boulevardier of the wild places. As maps go, Pilgrim Tongues is the one that will get you lost, but you’ll thank its author for it, later, or maybe even at the time.” David Wheatley

Additional Information

Weight .220 kg
Dimensions 21 x 147 x 1 cm

Product Detail

  • Pages : 124
  • Cover :
  • Language : English
  • Publisher : Wrecking Ball Press
  • ISBN : 978-1-9031103-1-7
  • Dimensions : 14.7cm x 21cm
  • Released : 21.11.15

About The Author

Author

Cliff Forshaw is a poet and painter. 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 London. After working in Spain, Mexico, Germany and New York and freelance writing in London, he completed a doctorate on Renaissance literature at Oxford. Since then he has lived in Snowdonia, and taught at Bangor, Sheffield and now Hull University, where he is Senior Lecturer inEnglish. Cliff’s collections include Trans (Collective Press, Wales, 2005), and Vandemonian, (Arc, 2013). He has been writer-in-residence in France, Romania, Tasmania and California, twice been a Hawthornden Writing Fellow, and won the Welsh Academi John Tripp Award. “The voice here is distinctive and mercurial – cool, intelligent yet engaged – the spirit of Larkin, perhaps, re-emerging, muscular and revitalised, in the 21st century.” Flarestack Pamphlet Prize Judges. “His Hull reveries take place in the aftermath of long travels, from which he salvages snatches of vivid speech for his poems ...the end rhymes ring, the internal rhymes flutter, but within their frame the lines’ varying rhythms move, like a dancer, to freedom.” Alison Brackenbury in Under The Radar “Traversing oceans from Saigon to Newfoundland to the Humber, a Larkinesque focal point is Hull ... The writing is energising and unpredictable, and demands to be read and re-read.” Sarah Jackson in The New Writer.