*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

Artemis

Restored statue of the Ephesian Diana / Artemis.

What we have left of you is only this…

Yet, your turreted crown and stony nimbus

is so much more than what is left of so much else.

You rise, like an ear of corn, from the cob, above

the nubbly rows of breasts — face, hands, feet

all dark against up-flowering stone — a bush

with thorns and nuts, hands opening like leaves.

Elsewhere I’ve seen a maize goddess, maybe your half-sister:

dark face, hands and tiny feet upon an unexpected square.

Yet, still you rise, billow like stony smoke. Three griffins

on your turreted crown, on your breastplate a boar and hare.

Your hands are parentheses that cannot help

but ironize your stance. Your four rows of teats,

more munificent than a bitch who has just whelped.

One of my poems "Apollo Belvedere" has just won second prize in the Classical Association Verse and Voice Competition. I'll be reading it at the prize-giving at Sir John Soane's Museum in London on Saturday, 25 April. Here it is, together with a companion piece "Artemis" and the images that inspired both poems.

Apollo Belvedere

Plaster cast of the celebrated white marble statue known as the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican Museum, which is thought to be a Roman copy (Hadrianic period, c.120-140 AD) of a lost bronze statue made between 350 and 325 BC by the Greek sculptor Leochares.

“Exegi monumentum aere perennius.” (I have built a monument outlasting bronze.) Horace 3. 30[

So, not quite the deity, but a plaster cast,

a copy of a copy of another copy. Phoney?

… a xeroxed god cannot quite hope to outlast

either Parian marble or Achaean bronze.

This delicate pretender, unlike his namesake,

must suffer the elements, but, though immune to pain,

craves — Poor impressionist? Sad boastful fake? —

our careful protection from wind, ice and rain.

He’s like so many other gods who cling

to the daily care and security we bring.

All start to slobber, wither, once we’ve gone,

melt away that marbled muscle tone.

He thinks he’s loosed a consequential arrow,

but has merely, again, oddly mislaid his bow.

I've just done an interview with Chris Jones as part of his Two-Way Poetry Podcast series. You can listen here. Click on the link below:

Cliff Forshaw on Arthur Rimbaud, both in translation and as an influence on his own book-length sequence RE:VERB The Two-Way Poetry Podcast

Here is Chris's introduction:

"In this episode, I discuss Arthur Rimbaud with Cliff Forshaw. We focus on Rimbaud's poem 'Vowels', translated by Cliff in his collection French Leave: Versions and Perversions, and Cliff's sequence RE:VERB which retells the life of Rimbaud in verse. Cliff also reflects on his latest book, Elemental, and reads the opening piece 'Remains' in full.

"Cliff relates how he first came to Rimbaud as a school boy. He talks about the long journey he took to come to write a book of translations of (mainly) 19th century French poets. He goes on to discuss, at length, his long narrative poem RE:VERB which illuminates the life of Arthur Rimbaud, from decadent poet to merchant and gun runner in Africa. He reads from, and talks about, the opening poems in the collection ('Hooligan in Hell' and 'Alchemy of the Word'). Why is Rimbaud so interesting as a writer and as an individual? We go on to explore Cliff's interest in art and how that feeds back into his identity as a writer.

"Finally, we discuss the work in his latest book, Elemental, landing on the opening poem - 'Remains' to read and reflect on. I ask him what he is planning to write/publish next."

*

*

*

*

Here's a link to the Friday Poem where Annie Fisher reviews 'Elemental' by Cliff Forshaw (Templar Poetry, 2025)

Meanwhile a couple of snippets:

"This is serious, intelligent, carefully crafted poetry; sometimes spikily witty, often lyrical. What impresses me most is Forshaw’s skill with poetic forms, his use of rhyme, and the momentum he manages to sustain. There’s a flow of thought from one poem (or sequence of poems) to the next that’s both conversational and compelling."

"Forshaw is a painter as well as a poet, and the final third of the book is devoted to ekphrastic poems. We find him here in a more lyrical, nuanced and expansive mood, particularly in ‘Ukiyo-e’, an evocative sequence based on nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige. Forshaw’s artist’s eye is much in evidence here and he clearly enjoyed writing this sequence. I enjoyed it too – as well as checking out the images he refers to. All human life is here. Fishmongers, traders, courtesans, boatmen, mothers and children go about the anonymous, bustling business of their lives while “Distant Fuji looks on / as always, unimpressed.”

‘Ukiyo-e’ translates as “pictures of the floating or transitory world” and this sequence is, I’m surmising, the best expression of Forshaw’s position on “the great matter of life and death”, i.e. an attitude that looks at the world – in all its beauty and ugliness – with acceptance, allowing oneself, as the epigraph says, to be “carried along on the river of life like a calabash that drifts downstream”.

My new collection Elemental, which won the Straid Collection Prize in 2023, has just appeared from Templar.

Elemental begins with a series of elegiac sonnets, moving from a mother’s death, through reflections on the stuff of the material world, to examine the rituals and language we use to deal with impermanence, fragility and loss.

Central sequences consider how we see the natural world through art, observation and myth and work variations on Japanese woodblock prints depicting the sights, smells and sounds of an ancient pilgrimage.

The final sequence - WRITTEN IN LIGHT - looks at old photographs of life in a Yorkshire market-town: people from various classes at work and play, their distinctive attitudes and dress. The book concludes with “Lanterns” and “Fade” which look at what, respectively, a Victorian painting and a twentieth-century film can tell us of what may be preserved against time.

Listen to poems from the collection below

Ash Dust Fade Junior Dictionary Remains

Lyrebird

"In Elemental, Forshaw has written poetry of strong durability and elegiac power, testing the resources of language in the face of absolute loss. The ubiquitous figure of the poet’s mother is ‘hallowed’ but ‘hollowed out’ in death, yet retrieved and vividly present, in poems that work wonders with the long reach of memory, the sonnet form and the nature of elegy itself, even as ‘the earth remains so cold and strange’."

David Wheatley

"Elemental is full of the old energy, undiminished. Forshaw is on top form, mixing elegy and satire, fury and sadness, dandyish wit and plain speaking about the less comfortable truths, to great effect. It could be his most Baudelairean book yet."

Christopher Reid

As the Donald assumes power once again, in place of an effective malediction, I offer this hopeless little prayer. It has appeared previously, but seems worth reposting.

Click on the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2mCj16b9SQ

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

In Winter

after the German of Georg Trakl “Im Winter”

This field now glows, so cold, so white.

The sky, so vastly lonely, stark

as hunters return from the woods’ deep dark

and jackdaws dart by the pond’s blue light.

The forests seem to keep their silence,

glimpsed fires flecking woodlanders’ huts.

You hear a sleigh, off in the distance,

as that grey moon first starts to cut

above where a deer now bleeds to death

and ravens share their dirty joke.

Reeds tremble. All else must hold its breath.

A footstep. First all is frost. Then smoke.