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To be clear about what to expect from this collection right from the off, Clare Shaw (they/them) is a poet who is intimately acquainted with first-hand experience of trauma and mental ill-health. That said, they are also a living testament to the necessity of maintaining hope in humanity. As well as being a fine poet, they are a creative writing tutor and mental health educator. They say of themselves on their website (clareshaw.co.uk) that -
All my work is underpinned by a deep faith in language; words have the power to harm and help us, and powerful language can transform us as individuals, communities and societies.
If you believe, as I do, that poetry can be intrinsically therapeutic in and of itself, then here is a seminal example of its restorative qualities. Shaw carries scars, both literally and figuratively, and doesn’t shy away from presenting them on the page. As with their previous collections with Bloodaxe, Straight ahead (2006), Head on (2012) and Flood (2018), their fourth collection is unwaveringly direct and often painfully raw and honest; but more than this, it is also beautifully written, with such a palpable sense of community, interconnectedness, humanity and shared experience, that one comes away from reading it feeling emotionally richer and in no way diminished.
The title of this collection is a direct reference to the book of the same name by Lewis et al. (2000), a text written by three psychiatrists which draws on scientific research to give an account of the complexities of love, and its essential role in human well-being.
Some of the poems in Shaw’s collection were written as part of a residency at the 10th International Congress of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect in 2018; others were commissioned for the Write Where We Are Now project , curated by Carol Ann Duffy and the Manchester Writing School, in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Other poems reference academic psychology papers (e.