Description
Book SynopsisJo Clement's first collection confronts Romantic impressions of British Gypsy ethnicity and lyrically lays them to rest. From Wordsworth to Top Gear, her poems invite us to consider notions of otherness, trespass, and craft. She steps between ancient stopping places and mardy council estates to trill elegiac Romanes, English, and birdsong about witches, wild camping, and Silver Cross prams. Compelled by a brutal Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller diasporic legacy, Outlandish tenderly praises the poem-as-protest and illuminates a hidden and threatened culture. Born in Darlington in 1986, Jo Clement received a scholarship to gain a PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. She has published two pamphlets, including Moveable Type (2020). She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Northumbria University, Editor of Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine, and founded the imprint Wagtail with support from the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC).
Trade ReviewIt is very rare to find a young poet with such an alert musical ear, able to listen ahead for the shape of a sound yet to be uttered. -- Sean O'Brien
Here is delight – these poems, rich and strange, brim from ‘the skim/of blood that can’t settle’. Jo Clement’s gifts shine and dazzle: amongst the darting, many-layered music of her imagery and sensuous evocation of northerly landscapes gleams a clear-sightedness politically aware and historically acute. Meaning is interrogated as a riverine process and emerges, movingly, in significances found later. Part urban fable, part re-imagining of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller culture, these poems are beautifully made to be read and re-read, savoured for their sharp, apple-bite tenderness, their truth and wisdom, their sheer originality. -- Pippa Little
This is the word of the weathered hand and of the hard, hale youth; the tattered treasure, the grafter and the fetter-breaking wild. These intoxicating and fine-sprung poems instantly place Clement in the front rank of Traveller writers. May they also relight our wonder at the depths of all unsung Englands. -- Damian Le Bas
Table of Contents11 Prefatory note 15 The Impression of Water 16 Family Silver 17 Vault 20 Inheritance 21 King Faa 22 Teesdale Erratics 23 Big Fat Gypsy Swindle 24 Cobsong 26 At Eildon 27 Smithsong 28 Market 29 Mass 30 The Sly and Unseen Day 31 Tinker’s Tea 32 Knots 33 Larch 34 The Graver 35 Wild Camp 36 Ironwork, V&A 37 Outlandish 38 Haunt 39 Crown 40 Paisley 41 Vardo 42 A Stopping-Place 43 Craft 44 Pome 45 Pollard 46 Playing Cards 48 Self-portrait as 100 Travellers 49 Wonderful Fish 50 Giftorse 51 Nightjar 52 The Romani Star 53 Le Bûcher 54 Causeway 55 Periwinkle 56 Manes 57 Polished 58 Travelling Light 59 Rite 60 Singing Lesson 62 Homecoming 64 FLASH! 65 Prophet Mark 66 Shoed 67 Dirce (The Bull’s Shadow) 68 Fetlock 69 Groundsheet 70 Aubade 71 Passage 72 Caulbearer 75 Notes and dedications 77 List of illustrations
