This is a ghost story. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe there are other explanations for the floating lights, the footsteps, the fear. I Saw What I Know is Clare Shaw’s fifth collection with Bloodaxe. As well as being the compelling story of growing up in haunted houses, it’s also an interrogation of truth. Told in multiple voices and forms, this book will unsettle you with its shadowy figures, shifting perspectives and stairways to nowhere. But – with Shaw’s characteristic confidence and delight in creative expression – it will also reassure you that language offers healing, protection and redemption.
Praise for Clare Shaw's poetry:
‘Clare Shaw’s Towards a General Theory of Love is a large-hearted and unflinching exploration both of love and the desolation felt at its lack or loss. Exquisitely crafted, these poems inhabit a range of forms, each as fitting and natural to their theme as skin is to flesh.’ – Kathryn Bevis, Poetry News
‘As with their previous collections with Bloodaxe, Straight ahead (2006), Head on (2012) and Flood (2018), their fourth collection is unwaveringly direct and often painfully raw and honest; but more than this, it is also beautifully written, with such a palpable sense of community, interconnectedness, humanity and shared experience, that one comes away from reading it feeling emotionally richer and in no way diminished.’ – Charlotte Burton, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, on Towards a General Theory of Love
'Clare Shaw’s speaker in Towards a General Theory of Love is fittingly eccentric and various. There is rage, playfulness, despair and yearning in this quest for an understanding of our need for attachment at all costs... Throughout these poems, the speaker – never the spokesperson – shows a light touch with dark material. They resist any temptation to instruct, and the lessons learned are all the more valuable for it.’ – Lydia Kennaway, Stand
'I am rarely able to say that I liked every single poem in a collection, but this book is an exception to that rule. Shaw’s poems explore the complexities of grief, trauma and love, often through the figure of ‘Monkey’. Shaw’s monkey figure represents the controversial psychology experiments conducted by Harry Harlow on baby monkeys in the 1950s, which proved that we need care, contact and love to survive.' – Rachel Carney, Created to Read (My Top 5 Books of 2023 - Poetry), on Towards a General Theory of Love
'Clare Shaw's fourth collection is an exploration of how grief, as the "negative image of love", colours and changes every aspect of the world... The poet's distinctive northern voice resonates through assured rhythm, exquisite rhyme when needed, and the music of lament especially in elegies and memories about their mother.' – Pauline Rowe, Orbis, on Towards a General Theory of Love
‘There is a quiet, cool, authentic voice to the poems of Flood. A flood that destroyed Clare Shaw’s home town, mental illness, self-injury, the end of a relationship, are all experiences recounted with factual detachment… There is a sense that the poet’s most intimate surroundings have betrayed her, but the stillness and control with which Shaw writes reveal quiet layers of intensity drawn from unstable places.’ – Carla-Rosa Manfredino, The Times Literary Supplement, on Flood
‘I highly recommend Flood… Calling this collection a response to a town’s flooding does it scant justice; it is a howl against suffering. But outrage is not enough, crafting must come to the fore and through 46 poems Shaw demonstrates her command of subtle rhythm and intriguing internal rhyme. Sometimes deceptively simple in their initial appearance, on further reading all of these poems reveal a deep level of profundity, leaving a mark as indelible as the high-water line of a receding flood.’ – John Irving Clarke, Write Out Loud, on Flood
‘Hold your breath when you read Clare Shaw’s poems. Startling, searing, scorching, this is an emotional blast of a book.’ – Jackie Kay, on Straight Ahead
Clare Shaw at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023
In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Clare begins with ‘My father was no ordinary man’ from their 2018 collection Flood. Clare then reads a selection of poems from Towards a General Theory of Love: ‘Monkey Writes a Poem About His Mother’, ‘Rhosymedre: Prelude on a Welsh Hymn’, ‘Monkey and I Discuss the Difficulty of Working Therapeutically with Non-verbal Traumatic Memories’, ‘Monkey Joins a Dating App’, ‘Monkey Reads William Blake’ and ’Child Protection Policy’. Clare ends the reading with ‘Who knows what it’s like’, from Flood.
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