Full Description
Clare Shaw's fourth collection Towards a General Theory of Love shows that poetry can say as much as about who we are - and especially how we feel - as psychology. They also feed each other.
Harry Harlow's famous experiments on baby monkeys changed the course of psychology. They proved that we need care, contact and love - and they inflicted profound and lasting suffering on their subjects. Clare Shaw's poems in Towards a General Theory of Love are driven by the same furious need to understand the experience of love and its absence. Harlow's findings, attachment theory, mythology and art are set alongside stories of attraction, grief and desire. The book is inhabited by the character of Monkey, who shows by example how early attachments and trauma may shape us, but how ultimately the individual - like the reader - will come to realise her, his or their own general theory and practice of love.
Contents
9 What the Frog Taught Me About Love
10 Letter to My Mother
11 Elegy for My Grandma
13 abcedarian
14 The Night Your Mother Died
15 This is a very small poem
17 An Empirical Examination of the Stage Theory of Grief.
18 Morecambe Bay as Grief
20 Monkey Writes a Poem About His Mother
21 Rhosymedre: Prelude on a Welsh Hymn
22 The Day Thou Gavest
23 Lesbian Conception in the Euston Hilton
24 Midwife, Calderdale General Hospital
26 Nocturne for My Daughter
28 This Is About My Mother
29 Child Protection Policy
30 A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation
31 Monkey and I Discuss the Difficulty of Working Therapeutically with Non-verbal Traumatic Memories
33 My Bedroom
34 An account of my reading from six to sixteen years old.
35 I Ask Monkey How He Sleeps.
36 The Impact of Neglect on the Developing Brain
37 Why Did the Monkey Cross the Road?
38 Monkey Talks About Self Injury
39 Monkey Writes a Story About God
40 Monkey Joins a Dating App
41 Self Portrait as Monkey Getting Drunk
42 When I look at her
43 Monkey Teaches Me Map-reading Skills
44 What the Goldfish Taught Me about Love
45 Self-portrait as Hermaphroditus entering the water
46 Night Swimming, Derwentwater
48 Love as an Adder in Grizedale
49 Love as DIY
50 My Girlfriend Did Not Believe in Ghosts
51 Love as a Poem
52 The Titanic Reflects on the Recent Ending of a Long-term Relationship
53 Self-portrait as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore
54 I come from Kergulen
55 Love as a SatNav
56 Love as a Global Pandemic
57 What the Moon Taught Me About Love
58 Total Social Isolation in Monkeys
59 Love at the William Thompson Recreation Centre
60 Lorry Driver
61 The Garden of Earthly Delights
62 Everything Is a Gift
64 You couldn't make it up
65 Information for Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Rape
67 Other than Personality Disorder, what term could you use to describe these people?
68 Self-portrait as Hermaphroditus coming out of the water
69 Monkey Invites Me to Imagine
70 Chronicles of Narnia
71 If Love is Snow
72 Things I find attractive in a person
73 Instructions for Care
74 Day after a Migraine
75 Monkey Reads William Blake
79 Acknowledgements
