Cliff Forshaw

Cliff Forshaw is a poet and painter whose work engages with themes of place, nature, history and myth, and often features creative translation with ‘cover versions’ playing variations on various European poets including Rimbaud, Lorca, and early twentieth-century Russians.

Trans (Collective Press, 2005) culminates with an updating of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Vandemonian (Arc, 2013) focuses on Van Diemen’s Land and its inhabitants – human and animal, newcomer and Aborigine – to piece together a fragmentary history of Tasmania; Pilgrim Tongues (Wrecking Ball, 2015) travels from Hull to Vietnam and back, by way of Israel, Transylvania, California and Cambodia. In Satyr (Shoestring, 2017) an Elizabethan malcontent Satyrist, returns from the dead to appraise the contemporary world. Hole, a long satirical poem in which Philip Larkin leads us through a Dantean Hell (in search of Hull), is available online.

RE:VERB (Broken Sleep, 2022) recreates Rimbaud’s terrestrial adventures from Hooligan Poet and Seer in bohemian Paris, through the years as tough merchant and gun-runner in Africa, to his death aged thirty-seven in a Marseilles hospital. French Leave: versions and perversions which works variations on French poets from Gautier to Apollinaire appeared from Broken Sleep in June, 2023.

Cliff studied painting at art college followed by English and European Literature at Warwick. After working in Spain, Mexico, Germany and New York, and freelance writing in London, he took an MA with Distinction in Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck, and was awarded a British Academy scholarship to complete a doctorate on Elizabethan satire at Oxford. He taught at Bangor and Sheffield, was senior lecturer in English at Hull University, and prosody consultant for the OED. He has been writer-in-residence in France, Romania, Tasmania, Kyrgyzstan, a Djerrassi resident artist in California, twice a Hawthornden writing fellow, winner of the Welsh Academi John Tripp award, and appeared at the International Poetry Festival of Granada, Nicaragua.