Gypsy and the Poet

Morley David

Beginning with the real-life encounter between the poet John Clare and a Gypsy named Wisdom Smith, David Morley reinvigorates the sonnet sequence to stage the fellowship that develops between the two men. We see the Gypsy and the poet banter, argue and teach each other lessons; work, love, and lose what they have loved. The central section of the book enacts Clare's own belief in the creative forms of nature itself: "I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down".

About the Author

David Morley is an ecologist and naturalist by background. His poetry has won fourteen writing awards and prizes, including the Templar Poetry Prize, the Poetry Business Competition, an Arts Council of England Writer's Award, an Eric Gregory Award, the Raymond Williams Prize and a Hawthornden Fellowship. His previous collection "The Invisible Kings" (Carcanet, 2007) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He is also known for his pioneering ecological poetry installations within natural landscapes and for the creation of "slow poetry" sculptures and I-Cast poetry films. His "writing challenges" podcasts are among the most popular literature downloads on iTunes worldwide: two episodes are now preloaded on to all demo Macs used in Apple Stores around the world. He has performed his poems and stories at many of the major literary festivals. He writes essays, criticism and reviews for the Guardian and Poetry Review. A leading international advocate of creative writing, he wrote "The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing" and is co-editor with the Australian poet Philip Neilsen of The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing. He currently teaches at the University of Warwick.

Reviews

"Here are two outsiders working at poetry from the underside of nature, Clare now 'in a brown huff', Wisdom snaring 'a warren with a snigger of wires'. Using a mixture of sonnets, Romani language, concrete poetry, and the dynamics of birdsong, Morley conjures a marvellous sense of nature as intimacy, something precise yet loaded and of immense importance to us" – George Szirtes

"A rare and beautiful book" – The Guardian on "The Invisible Kings" (2007)

"Enchantment by David Morley is a linguistic feast" – Jonathan Bate, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year 2010

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