Featured Poet: Cliff Forshaw

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Loop

62 seconds of the extinct Thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger on film. 

Within the box, it growls, it twists,
scowls through its repertoire of tricks,
ignores the camera — or gurns up close, turns
again, to flop, to gnaw that paw-trapped bone.

It paces out its trap of light; one hundred reps
while hindquarters zither bars of sun;
claws cage’s mesh, hangs stretched
as if to take the measure of itself.

You saw. You see. And what we’ve got is what was shot:
short clips, fragments caught and stitched
together in a loop of black and white.

Nine lives? Not quite. It’s down. It’s out.
It’s on its feet and born again. Like a repetition
compulsion, like… like reincarnated light.

 

Cliff Forshaw has been a writer-in-residence in Romania, Tasmania and California, twice been a Hawthornden Writing Fellow and won the Welsh Academi John Tripp Award. His most recent collection Vandemonian (Arc, 2013) pieces together a fragmentary history of Tasmania. Pilgrim Tongues will appear from Wrecking Ball in 2014. Cliff is also a painter and has exhibited his work in the UK and USA. He has made three short films accompanying collaborative anthologies focussing on East Yorkshire: Slipway (Wordquake commission 2013) Drift (Humber Mouth Literature Festival commission 2007) and Under Travelling Skies: Departures from Larkin, which won the first Larkin25 Words Award. Cliff lives in Hull where he teaches at the university.

Cliff’s website is: http://www.cliff-forshaw.co.uk/

For details of Vandemonian: http://www.arcpublications.co.uk/book.php?description_id=490