Annie Fisher reviews 'Elemental' by Cliff Forshaw (Templar Poetry, 2025)
The Friday Poem on 12th September 2025
Junior Dictionary
Acorn, adder, ash and beech
now slip beyond the old tongue’s reach.
Bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker,
all dusted with the word hoard’s canker.
Cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern,
the words exhaled cannot return.
Hazel, heron, heather, ivy
– all that once was fresh and lively.
Kingfisher, lark and mistletoe,
poised on the brink, about to go.
Nectar, newt, sleek otter too
(strewn columbines – There’s rue for you).
The treasury of words is sacked;
put out to pasture, and that’s tarmacked.
The fallen elm and weeping willow,
the silent copse and ripped-out hedgerow.
With bumblebee and unnamed birds
all flesh is grass around gravestone words.
And all the life that has ever been
swiped from the world, thumbed from the screen.
‘Junior Dictionary’ is from Elemental by Cliff Forshaw (Templar Poetry, 2025) — big thanks to Cliff Forshaw and Templar for letting us reproduce it here.
Cast a cold eye, on life, on death
On the cover is a painting of two humble cottages. They’re roughly rendered in thick, muddy-coloured oils and squat at the foot of a dark mountain under an ominously clouded sky. The location doesn’t matter. Who lives there doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s you. Maybe me. It’s bleak and oppressive. Storms are on their way.
The brooding image and stark, one-word title are deliberate. Elemental deals with the nitty-gritty (literally). It’s about the dust we come from and return to; it’s an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with what Zen Buddhists sometimes call “The great matter of life and death”.
This is serious, intelligent, carefully crafted poetry; sometimes spikily witty, often lyrical. What impresses me most is Forshaw’s skill with poetic forms, his use of rhyme, and the momentum he manages to sustain. There’s a flow of thought from one poem (or sequence of poems) to the next that’s both conversational and compelling.
This is serious, intelligent, carefully crafted poetry; sometimes spikily witty, often lyrical
The collection is dedicated to Forshaw’s late mother and opens with a sonnet sequence sparked by her death, but Forshaw doesn’t dwell on his loss at a personal level. News of her death reaches him (rather bizarrely) in Transylvania, where he has just seen, in a Saxon cemetery, an epitaph on someone’s tombstone reading, “Lie still in foreign soil”. From this remote vantage point, he takes a step back to consider what death does to us all at an elemental level. This is from the opening poem, ‘Remains’:
[…] Whoever you were, laid low in the lie of the land, you are now (whatever now might mean) your own remains – Just let the world, its weather, drain right through your tongue, your ribs, whatever stubbornly persists of you.
I was struck by “whatever now might mean”. It reminded me, for some reason, of King Charles’s infamous “whatever in love means” (after his engagement to Diana) and suggested to me that Forshaw might be more interested in exploring philosophical ideas than sharing personal feelings.
There are autobiographical elements, but not many, and Forshaw’s voice, particularly in the early poems, is unsentimental to the point of sounding dispassionate. Even the titles sound brusque: ‘Remains’, ‘Bleach’, ‘Bakelite’, ‘Bisto’, ‘Fire’, ‘Ash’, ‘Grit’, ‘Dust’. These poems, and many others in the collection, are sonnets, a form that suits Forshaw’s reflective mind-set. The tone is cerebral and cool. He’s determined to call a spade a spade, if not a bloody shovel. Here’s the beginning of ‘Bleach’:
We’re born between piss and shit, or so St. Augustine once said. Live long enough and the likelihood now is that’s how you’ll end up dead.
And here’s the ending of ‘Dust’:
Your bed’s a megalopolis of mites. Think shower, sink; drains clogged. Black mushrooms. Hair. That’s you. That’s all your family, down there.
The occasional family poem suggests a Catholic upbringing, but the adult Forshaw is uncompromisingly atheistic. There’s a Larkinesque bluntness to many poems, as in this final stanza from the poem, ‘Star’:
Create yourself; your Bible’s bound with skin, your only future lives remain within. Amor fati1. Forget that distant star. Stay earthbound. Become whatever it is you are.
In the poem ‘404’, Forshaw uses the familiar ‘page not found’ error as a metaphor. Just as “whatever it is you are” can be instantly wiped by an internet glitch, so our histories are erased by our own declining faculties and ultimately by an indifferent universe. The poem is in the form of a kyrielle2, and the following refrain (with variations) tolls like a funeral bell at the end of each stanza:
No sense in asking why.
You’re doubly dead.
Damnatio memoriae.(Damnatio memoriae refers to the deliberate political erasure of a person from official records.)
The middle section of the book turns to the decline of the natural world, where “Acorn, adder, ash and beech / now slip beyond the old tongue’s reach” and where we’re now more likely to hear fulsome birdsong in a gallery’s sound installation than in a forest. There’s a poignantly nostalgic poem about glow-worms (which nods to Andrew Marvell’s poem, ‘The Mower to the Glow-Worms’):
These living lamps now all but doused; country comets fizzled in childhood’s ditch.
Marvell is referenced again in ‘The Marvellous Garden’, a longer, hard-hitting poem that itemises some of the sickening ways humankind has meddled with nature for its own ends:
As Man’s best friend down from the cuddly surface
has been rejigged, improved, repurposed,
with crippled hips, short breath and weakened jaw,
docked tail, flopped ears and clawless paw,
so, as well as Fauna, the Flora too
is re-created, made brand-new.
Our trek from Genesis to Revelation,
now passes through these vast plantations
where patented monocultured GM crops
lay waste the forest and the ancient copse.This is grim. Again, in ‘In The Garden’, Forshaw is understandably downbeat as he walks in his own garden, with winter approaching, and considers his own mortality:
Your shadow boxes with you as you pass,
already long across the freshened grass.
And it’s all grass. All long sheaved grass.Forshaw is a painter as well as a poet, and the final third of the book is devoted to ekphrastic poems. We find him here in a more lyrical, nuanced and expansive mood, particularly in ‘Ukiyo-e’, an evocative sequence based on nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige. Forshaw’s artist’s eye is much in evidence here and he clearly enjoyed writing this sequence. I enjoyed it too – as well as checking out the images he refers to. All human life is here. Fishmongers, traders, courtesans, boatmen, mothers and children go about the anonymous, bustling business of their lives while “Distant Fuji looks on / as always, unimpressed.”
‘Ukiyo-e’ translates as “pictures of the floating or transitory world” and this sequence is, I’m surmising, the best expression of Forshaw’s position on “the great matter of life and death”, i.e. an attitude that looks at the world – in all its beauty and ugliness – with acceptance, allowing oneself, as the epigraph says, to be “carried along on the river of life like a calabash that drifts downstream”.
He’s determined to call a spade a spade, if not a bloody shovel
In the final poem, ‘Fade’, Forshaw reflects not on a painting, but on a scene from Fellini’s ‘Roma’, in which an ancient fresco is excavated by archaeologists only to disintegrate irrecoverably once exposed to the air of a modern city. The symbolism is clear, and the poem’s last line, which I won’t spoil for you by quoting, is ringing still in my head.
There’s a great deal to admire in this collection, and a great deal to think about. Forshaw is doing the best that any poet can do in these times, which is to bear witness to things as they are and to face the fact that there’s no easy way out of the mess we’re in, if any at all. Time and again, as I read this sobering collection, I thought of the three lines by W.B. Yeats that became his epitaph:
Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!
2 https://classicalpoets.org/2018/06/how-to-write-a-kyrielle/
Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: Infinite in All Perfections (2016) and The Deal (2020), and one recently from Mariscat Press: Missing the Man Next Door (2024). She is a member of Fire River Poets, Taunton.
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