The poet Jack Clemo (1916-94) born amidst the looming clay dumps and kaolin mines of mid-Cornwall, is one of the weirdest features of the twenthieth century's literary landscape. A working class deaf-blind syphilitic sex-mystic, Clemo's tragic and often claustrophobic life offers the biographers a unique challenge.
Luke Thompson has drawn from previously unstudied material, inviting Clemo to speak through his own diaries, manuscripts and correspondance. The result is a compelling and superbly researched biography of this resilient, uncompromising hermit-poet.
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