Released 31st July 2022 // 70 pages // 978-1-915079-85-5
 
An intriguing and idiosyncratic book, RE:VERB energetically recreates Rimbaud’s terrestrial adventures: from the Hooligan Poet and Seer in bohemian Paris, through the years as tough merchant and gun-runner in Africa, to end with his death aged thirty-seven in a Marseilles hospital. Cliff Forshaw’s verse narrative allows us to glimpse Rimbaud’s life, travels and the diverse characters he dealt with through the disillusioned poet’s own eyes, offset by the reports and asides of those who knew and observed him.
 
 
PRAISE for RE:VERB:
 
These poems reflect the fiercely independent spirt which characterised Arthur Rimbaud in all the phases of his short, turbulent life. In tightly-structured verse and vigorous, earthy diction, Cliff Forshaw lets the poet tell his own story, but in counterpoint with other voices and characters who see him through the filter of his masks as a merchant, explorer and ethnographer. Drawing on documents and letters, but wearing his research lightly, Forshaw unravels the poet’s tangled adventures in Africa, Asia and elsewhere with welcome incisiveness. His colourful poems of place and mood also illuminate Rimbaud’s inner life, and leave us with some intriguing clues as to why the brilliant poète maudit gave up his vocation and ‘donned the grotesque finery of trade’.
   — Carol Rumens
 
Part translation, part verse biography, but entirely a law unto itself, Cliff Forshaw’s RE:VERB is a freewheeling jeu d’esprit, a cocktail of bad blood, ‘gloomy lust and sanctimonious doom’. Rampaging from the beatific, foul-mouthed teenaged poet to the fulminations of Une saison en enfer and the crucible of Africa, RE:VERB is a chasse spirituelle of sortilege and thaumaturgy, delivered with exquisite verve and oomph. Could Rimbaud read it himself, he would surely be moved to the same outburst he reserved for reminders of his own work – ‘Absurd, ridiculous, disgusting’.
   — David Wheatley
 
The high energy of Cliff Forshaw’s poems makes me think particularly of John Donne And the other Metaphysicals: argument, wit, erudition and force of feeling all working to convey an authentic vision of the world we live in.
   — Christopher Reid