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Book Cover for: Flood, Clare Shaw

Flood

Clare Shaw

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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
  • Publish Date: Jun 21st, 2018
  • Pages: 80
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.40in - 0.30in - 0.30lb
  • EAN: 9781780374208
  • Categories: European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

About the Author

Clare Shaw was born in Burnley in 1972. Their first two collections with Bloodaxe were Straight Ahead (2006), which 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'. Their later collections are Flood (2018), a New Writing North Read Regional title in 2019, and Towards a General Theory of Love (2022) which won a Northern Writers' Award and was a Poetry Society Book of the Year.