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Clare Shaw - Towards a General Theory of Love

I only discovered Clare Shaw this year, and while I wish I'd discovered their work earlier, I am freaking delighted that I get to discover a poet who is busy doing lots of events and has a sumptuous back catalogue. Clare has immediately joined the ranks of poets I'm obsessed with (like Jacqueline Saphra and Terrance Hayes).

Clare has four poetry collections published with Bloodaxe, the latest of which is Towards a General Theory of Love which came out this year (2022). They have been nominated for and won various prizes and do lots of training around poetry and around mental health, and they stay in Yorkshire and have a lovely Burnley accent with a touch of Yorkshire to it. I highly recommend you look them up on YouTube to hear them reading their own poetry, or search for them on Spotify to find an interview.

Towards a General Theory of Love is a good looking book with the cover using part of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Early Delights. In it Clare explores love, with the character of Monkey recurring throughout, and explorations of Harry Harlow's experiments on monkeys which helped in developing attachment theory. They also explore grief, particulary around the loss of Clare's mother.

For me, having lost my own mother in the last year it was these themes of grief, loving and unloving which particularly spoke to me. I've read reviews of this collection which said they read it in an evening. I couldn't do that. This took me days. Some poems required reading and rereading and reading again to settle in. One poem, abcedarian required reading and rereading again and again over weeks, and sometimes I couldn't get through the whole thing. I just read it again then to see if I could give you a wee taste of it, so now I'm crying again because it's amazing. I can't find a bit I could pull out, so I'm just going to share the whole poem with you, below.

But talking about crying doesn't get across that Clare's work is funny and irreverant and real and beautiful. It's amazingly crafted in a way that means you barely notice the craft.

Dawn Gorman reviewed this for Writing in Education and said it read in turns like a play, like therapy, like a friend. She declared it a triumph. She wasn't wrong.

Find out more about Clare Shaw:











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