Selected Poems

Jack Clemo was called 'one of the strangest and most original writers of our time' (Sunday Times). Born in 1916, the son of a clay-kiln worker, he became a mystic recluse, living in poverty amidst the bleak, clay wastelands of Cornwall. He was also stone deaf, and after writing two visionary novels and his autobiographical Confession of a Rebel, he lost his sight in 1955. His Selected Poems shows the development of his poetry from the puritanical isolationism of his early anti-nature, anti-church poems, to his later, mellower outlook.