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He was born deaf, and lost his sight in middle life. Visionary is the usual word attached to him... methody meets vision. A lot of the oddity of his writing may be attributable to the oddity of the actual landscape from which he was writing in and out of - St Austell and area, with great spoil tips from the china clay workings - "moon" landscape It's not a pleasant or humane vision. There's an undertow to Cornish culture that comes I think from the dreary methodism and the poverty - the only reason they developed the A30 in recent years was to take the money out more quickly - and Clemo gives it voice a lot of his stuff is out from independent presses. I was reading some of his dialect stories in a Penzance bookshop last month. Can't say I was knocked out by them The poetry is more than worth a look tho. There's a selected L ----- Original Message ----- From: "david.bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: 29 May 2002 00:05 Subject: Re: Poetry | Re Alison's mention of A.L.Rowse and Cornwall can anyone give any | information on the Cornish poet Jack Clemo? I ask this with some | self-puzzlement, as I read his work, poems and autobiography, two decades | ago, was much taken with it, but one of those awful mental blanks has | descended on my memory in respect of him. I think he was blind (or deaf) and | recall being impressed by a certain character in the work, but for the life | of me all details have been filed away in a disused corner of my memory.