WIN $150 GIFT VOUCHERS: ALADDIN'S GOLD
Born in Darlington in 1986, Jo Clement is the recipient of a Northern Writers' Award and the Editor of Butcher's Dog poetry magazine. With support from the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC), she is the founder of the imprint Wagtail. Her poems have been shortlisted for the Bridport, Melita Hume and Troubadour International prizes. She has written for The Travellers' Times, BBC Radio 4 and BBC Your Local Arena, and currently works as a Creative Writing Lecturer at Northumbria University. Jo's debut pamphlet Moveable Type (New Writing North) was published in 2020.
It 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
