Approach to Murano

Kenneth Allsop called Jack Clemo 'the John Bunyan of the century'. 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 (Bloodaxe Books, 1988) shows the development of his poetry from the puritanical isolationism of his early anti-nature,...
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Kenneth Allsop called Jack Clemo 'the John Bunyan of the century'. 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 (Bloodaxe Books, 1988) shows the development of his poetry from the puritanical isolationism of his early anti-nature, anti-church poems, to his later, mellower outlook.Years after becoming blind and deaf, Jack Clemo met his wife Ruth, whom he married in 1968. This new collection includes the last poems he composed amid the Cornish clay-tips before they moved to Dorset in 1984, but most of the poems were written in Weymouth.Jack Clemo writes: 'The geographical change was related to a spiritual and emotional shift away from cramped and austere concepts of truth, and the double movement made me receptive during visits to other parts of Britain and, even more significantly, to Venice, whose glass-producing centre, the island of Murano, became a symbol of the clear-cut, luminous image, contrasting with my bleared and heavy clay idiom.'