Childhood memories of growing up in St Ives have inspired a new poetry collection. 

Boy Thing by Professor John Wedgwood Clarke, reflects upon his upbringing as a grocer’s son in the 1970s. 

“St Ives was very different to the way it is now,” said Prof Clarke, who is associate professor in creative writing at the University of Exeter. 

“Boy Thing is also about the impact of a common-enough experience of family crisis on a young boy and the anxieties it created, which were worked out through exploring the coastline around where I lived.

“I did a lot of my thinking through the things around me; they contained emotions I was feeling that I had no words for at the time.”

Prof Clarke began writing the collection in 2018, although some poems have their roots in work started much further back. His interaction with Exeter’s creative writing students also played an important role in motivating him to produce the book.

“I was teaching poems that had a strong autobiographical content and the students were responding well to them. I thought I’d better have a go myself so that I could demonstrate some of the techniques I was introducing them to, and it continued from there,” he said.

The finished work, published by Arc Publications, takes the form of two extended poem sequences across 41 sections, which Professor Clarke describes as a “poem memoir”. 

This is Prof Clarke’s third collection, following Ghost Pot (2013) and Landfill (2017). He has also worked as a TV presenter and researcher for BBC Four, with credits on The Books That Made Britain (2016), Through the Lens of Larkin (2017) and Cornwall’s Red River (2021), which is based on his research project about a post-industrial river in West Cornwall and is available on iPlayer until early June.