Jack Clemo

Reginald John Clemo (Jack Clemo) (11 March 1916 – 25 July 1994) was a British poet and writer who was strongly associated both with his native Cornwall and his strong Christian belief. His work was considered to be visionary and inspired by the rugged Cornish landscape. He was the son of a clay-kiln worker and his mother, Eveline Clemo (née Polmounter, died 1977), was a dogmatic nonconformist.

Clemo was born in the parish of St Stephen-in-Brannel near St Austell. His father was killed at sea towards the end of the First World War and he was raised by his mother who exerted a dominant influence on him. He was educated at the village school but after age of 13 his formal schooling ceased with the onset on his blindness. He became deaf around age 20, and blind in 1955, about 19 years later. The china clay mines and works around which he grew up were to feature strongly in his work.

Clemo's early work was published in the local press but his literary breakthrough came with the novel Wilding Graft, which was published by Chatto and Windus in 1948 winning an Atlantic Award. This was followed in 1949 by his autobiography, Confessions of a Rebel, which established Clemo as a remarkable and original writer. Clemo developed further as a writer and in 1951 he published his first collection, The Clay Verge. Set in a stark landscape, the poems explore the forces of nature and the workings of a hard-won grace. He received national recognition for the first time in the same year during the Festival of Britain where he was awarded a literary prize.

In 1970 he was appointed a Bard of the Gorseth Kernow and conferred with the title Poet of the Clay. In 1981, at the age of 65, he received an honorary literary doctorate from the University of Exeter.

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