Flood

By 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jun 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781780374215

Clare Shaw

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 later collections are Flood (2018), a New Writing North Read Regional title in 2019, and Towards a General Theory of Love (2022), written after winning a Northern Writers' Award. She is co-director of Kendal Poetry Festival, a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, and a regular tutor for the Writing Project, the Poetry School, Wordsworth Grasmere and Arvon. She also works as a mental health trainer 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. Along with the novelist Winnie M Li, Clare was the recipient of a Royal Society of Literature Literature Matters award in 2019, creating workshops and an online resource for survivors of trauma. In 2021, she co-wrote and presented Four Ways to Weather the Storm for BBC Radio Four, examining the relationship between creativity, landscape and resilience. Clare lives above Hebden Bridge with her daughter and their two pet rats.

Book preview

CLARE SHAW

FLOOD

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.

‘The energy and vivacity of Clare Shaw’s writing, its colloquial power, frame of reference and sheer sound is enough to mark her out as one of the most talented young poets to appear in recent years. Hers is a natural gift that speaks as it sings. It confronts the world with knowledge, pity, melancholy, affection and a kind of sympathetic fury, as if the world were shards and fragments that could be gathered into the ear and sung from the heart. And the remarkable thing is that she does gather it and sing it, that she imbues it with the passion owing to it.’ – George Szirtes

‘Hold your breath when you read Clare Shaw’s poems. Startling, searing, scorching, this is an emotional blast of a book.’ – Jackie Kay

Cover photograph by Pamela Robertson-Pearce

CLARE SHAW

Flood

For my people

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of The Moth, where some of these poems first appeared.

‘Rainhill Psychiatric Hospital 1992’, ‘This is a man’, ‘For the love of’ and ‘Just look’ were first published in Tom Woods: the DPA Work – Photographs of Rainhill Hospital and Camel Laird Shipyard by Cian Quayle, Audrey Linkman, Clare Shaw and Tom Woods (Stiedl, 2018).

‘My father was no ordinary man’ and ‘My mother was a verified miracle’ were first published in Project Boast: poems by 28 women, edited by Rachel Bentham and Alyson Hallett (Triarchy Press, 2018).

Thanks are due to the University of Huddersfield and the Royal Literary Fund for the support and the opportunities provided to me during my time as a Royal Literary Fellow. Special thanks to Kim Moore, John Foggin and Keith Hutson for their advice, support and encouragement.

With love to Niamh, Jamima and Hebden Bridge.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

What do I know

Who knows what it’s like

Instructions for coping in terrible times

For the journey.

Late Afternoon, Allan Bank

Water as Religion

And still I don’t know

Lovehearts

Double

Hydrology

Weather warning

How I heard

Roads and paths covered; flash flooding on steeper slopes

Flood Town