Outlandish by Jo Clement
Jo Clement's first collection confronts Romantic impressions of British Gypsy ethnicity and lyrically lays them to rest. From Wordsworth to Top Gear, her poems invite us to consider notions of otherness, trespass and craft. She steps between ancient stopping places and mardy council estates to trill elegiac Romanes, English, and birdsong about witches, wild camping and Silver Cross prams. Compelled by a brutal Gypsy, Roma and Traveller diasporic legacy, Outlandish tenderly praises the poem-as-protest and illuminates a hidden and threatened culture.
'Jo Clement writes poems of wonderful imagination, energy, and adventure, combining her magical intelligence with a brilliantly orchestrated language drawn from the words of the Roma and the worlds through which they invisibly travel.’ – David Morley
'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
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