The Taste of Glass

A very varied and colourful collection. There are numerous poems about love, both personal and perhaps fictional. There is a strong awareness of the real world and Nature in all its varieties (not least in that very fine and unexpected poem ‘The Roses of Heliogabalus’), but nevertheless it is the sense of a strong imagination at work that transforms the Real into Poetry that is so striking about this book. This is not another volume of careful observations that have been workshopped out of existence, but something altogether more wild and meaningful. — Fred Beake What I enjoy most about Clive’s poetry is its capacity to surprise, to lull the reader into the promise of the familiar and then completely change their understanding, their expectations, their view of life itself. These are poems of nuance and feeling, tactile descriptions and human emotion, imagination and inventiveness. — Robert Garnham