Gypsy and the Poet

Beginning with the real-life encounter between the poet John Clare and a Gypsy named Wisdom Smith, David Morley reinvigorates the sonnet sequence to stage the fellowship that develops between the two men. We see the Gypsy and the poet banter, argue and teach each other lessons; work, love, and lose what they have loved. The central section of the book enacts Clare's own belief in the creative forms of nature itself: I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down'.Here are two outsiders working at poetry from the underside of nature, Clare now in a brown huff', Wisdom snaring a warren with a snigger of wires'. Using a mixture of sonnets, Romani language, concrete poetry, and the dynamics of birdsong, Morley conjures a marvellous sense of nature as intimacy, something precise yet loaded and of immense importance to us.--George Szirtes