Cliff Forshaw has been a Hawthornden Writing Fellow, Blue Nose Poet-of-the-Year, Winner of the Welsh Academy John Tripp Award and Hydro-Tasmania International Writer-in-Residence at Hobart.

*** New publication***

Cliff Forshaw's collection Trans culminates in a rewriting of the Metamorphoses – Ovid meets a gross-out freak circus to chat about everything from bodily modification to virtual survival: Lord Rochester’s monkey; Enigma’s horns; the Reincarnation of Saint Orlan; Kevin Cyborg; sex changes and do-it-yourself surgery.

It’s myth. It's life, but not as we know it, Jim.

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Trans

by Cliff Forshaw

The Collective Press     ISBN 1 899449 90 6   

 “There is a real sense of attack and energy here as Forshaw gets to grips with the physical stuff of the world and, in the best sense of the time-worn phrase, ‘makes it new’. He’s clearly interested in what things look like, sound like and feel like, and has a highly original take on myth. Trans is also engaged in a kind of hyper-active dialogue with the sonnet form and with Classical and Renaissance writers as vehicles for invention and variation. These echoes highlight the constant flashes and sparkles of real wit, while Forshaw’s zest and erudition combine to make his work stand out from the mass of vaguely elegiac anecdote that dominates large areas of contemporary poetry. I’m pleased to see poetry that is so clearly ‘worked’ and shows the results of conscious reflection about craft in its strong rhythms and really tasty, crunchy internal rhymes and half rhymes. The ‘Trans’ section itself reads very much like a bravura finale where everything comes together. It surprises me that no-one’s thought about writing about the likes of Orlan and Enigma before, but again this helps to set his work apart. Trans is one of the most original collections I’ve read in a long time.”

David Kennedy, co-editor The New Poetry.