The Clay Hymnal and Clay Phoenix

The Clay Hymnal is a specially commissioned project by Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival on which Jim Causley collaborated with author Luke Thompson to make an album of poems by Cornish poet Jack Clemo as part his 2016 centenary celebrations. 'Clemo - a close friend of Charles Causley - was a fascinating poet who lived in the evocative Clay Country district of mid Cornwall and was greatly inspired by that dramatic, man-made landscape. Often described as angular, his poems couldn't be more different from that of his Launceston friend and that is paralleled in these new musical settings. Recorded in his home village, this project features some of the finest musicians in the Duchy and brings to life the clayscape world of Clemo.'

The CD was launched, in a concert by Jim and friends, alongside Luke Thompson’s biography of Clemo, Clay Phoenix, at the climax of this year’s Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival. 'Clay Phoenix is the first biography of Clemo, and it is the first study to draw from Clemo's extensive archives; an archive that includes sixty years of diaries, letters (including to and from Charles Causley, Cecil Day Lewis, Mary Whitehouse, AL Rowse, Frances Bellerby, TF Powys, George MacBeth and Sir Arthur Quiller Couch), manuscripts of every volume of Clemo’s work and a large photograph collection.'

'Jack Clemo (1916-94) was a strange feature of the twentieth century’s literary landscape. Deaf and blind for most of his adult life and raised in poverty at the foot of a waste dump in the china clay mining region of Cornwall, Clemo's experience of the world was harsh and imposing. Using his rural-industrial landscape as a symbol for his faith, sexuality and physical decline, Jack Clemo produced some of the most exciting, tense and vital poetry of the era.'

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Jim Causley - Angel Hill.