Head On

by Clare Shaw

Overview

From the direct trajectory of their first collection, Straight Ahead, Clare Shaw's second collection Head On turns an unflinching gaze into startling new territories. Structured by interweaving themes of political and personal conflict, the book begins and ends with the recurrent necessity of speaking out. And this is a book which speaks in equal measures, in precise and uncompromising language, about love and tenderness; violence and brutality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781852249519
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	11/22/2012
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Clare Shaw was born in Burnley in 1972. Their first two collections with Bloodaxe were Straight Ahead (2006), which attracted a Forward Prize Highly Commended for Best Single Poem, and Head On (2012), which according to the Times Literary Supplement is 'fierce, memorable and visceral'. Their later collections are Flood (2018), a New Writing North Read Regional title in 2019, and Towards a General Theory of Love (2022) which won a Northern Writers' Award and was a Poetry Society Book of the Year.

Table of Contents

I do not believe in silence 9

It could have been 11

Conversations with X and Y 13

Jude got an HGV licence 19

Going going 21

Cupboard 23

French lesson 24

Ewe 25

Night 27

Tree 28

Street Poetry 30

U 37

Recording crime 38

This isn't 40

The no baby poem 41

You 42

Not baby, nor boy 43

You took a tumble 44

Vow 46

The Lesbian Guide to Conception 48

Ewe in several parts 51

In the space of that year 57

She's waited half her life to write this 59

A withered brown flower takes on new colour 60

Ocixem 62

Irreversible 64

You'd start with the page 70