The Cured Arno

As a young man, Jack Clemo lived in poverty amidst the bleak clay wastelands of Cornwall. He was also stone deaf, and after writing two visionary novels and his autobiographical Confession of a Rebel, he lost his sight in 1955. His Selected Poems (1988) and Approach to Murano (1993) show the development of his poetry from a puritanical anti-nature stance to a later, mellower outlook. The Cured Arno was his last collection, which he had only just completed at the time of his death in...
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As a young man, Jack Clemo lived in poverty amidst the bleak clay wastelands of Cornwall. He was also stone deaf, and after writing two visionary novels and his autobiographical Confession of a Rebel, he lost his sight in 1955. His Selected Poems (1988) and Approach to Murano (1993) show the development of his poetry from a puritanical anti-nature stance to a later, mellower outlook. The Cured Arno was his last collection, which he had only just completed at the time of his death in 1994.Jack Clemo wrote: 'My Italian visits gave me a symbol that illuminated even those poems which have no connection with Italy. The cured Arno may represent the cured ego, and sometimes I only showed the situation that needed cure. Dante knew his river only in its sick state. It was later "cured" of its erratic and treacherous behaviour, its destructive winter floods and the stench of its dry mud bed in summer. The river image was apt for my purpose, whether I wrote about the Titanic disaster, which cured an earlier generation of its blind trust in mechanical power as the key to a safe world, or about my later marriage which cured my warped and bleak isolationism.'