Towards a General Theory of Love (Paperback)

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.

‘Clare Shaw’s Towards a General Theory of Love is a large-hearted and unflinching exploration both of love and the desolation felt at its lack or loss. Exquisitely crafted, these poems inhabit a range of forms, each as fitting and natural to their theme as skin is to flesh.’ – Kathryn Bevis, Poetry News (Christmas Reading, 2022)

‘Clare Shaw’s Towards a General Theory of Love was a standout for me. Beautiful, deceptively simple poems of huge weight and power. I love them for their wit and for the deep underlying emotion. Wonderful book.’ – Carole Bromley (Poetry Society Books of the Year 2022)

‘Clare Shaw’s speaker in Towards a General Theory of Love is fittingly eccentric and various. There is rage, playfulness, despair and yearning in this quest for an understanding of our need for attachment at all costs... Throughout these poems, the speaker – never the spokesperson – shows a light touch with dark material. They resist any temptation to instruct, and the lessons learned are all the more valuable for it.’ – Lydia Kennaway, Stand

‘As so often in Shaw’s poetry, wild landscapes offer their own compassion and comfort… But this collection also represents a deeply embodied interpretation of love, in its involvement of the whole human person.’ – Hannah Stone, The Lake

‘Towards a General Theory of Love inhabits an aqueous space, rocked by grief, anxiety, and despair, but also the promise of tenderness and love. Survival is not enough; poetry offers healing [...] Towards a General Theory of Love are poems to read and reread, to think about, and read again. They are a gift of love and grief, both of which are lakes that we ‘will walk by forever’.’ - Joanna Bourke

Clare Shaw was born in Burnley in 1972. Their first two collections with Bloodaxe were Straight Ahead (2006), which attracted a Forward Prize Highly Commended for Best Single Poem, and Head On (2012), which according to the Times Literary Supplement is 'fierce, memorable and visceral'. Their later collections are Flood (2018), a New Writing North Read Regional title in 2019, and Towards a General Theory of Love (2022) which won a Northern Writers' Award and was a Poetry Society Book of the Year.

Their poetry is widely anthologised – including 100 Queer Poems (Penguin Random House, 2022) and the National Trust’s Nature Poems (2023). It is also set to music, illustrated and staged, and has featured multiple times on Radio 4’s Poetry Please and Radio 3’s The Verb. In 2021, Clare wrote the libretto for the community opera Daylighting, which premièred at the Royal Academy of Music and was shortlisted for an Ivor Novello Award for Community and Engagement. They have also written for theatre and radio, and as a mental health educator and trainer, they have published numerous resources in the field of mental health. Clare lives on the hills above Hebden Bridge and in 2022, co-wrote and presented Radio Four’s Weathering the Storm which explored the relationship between art, resilience and the landscape of the Calder Valley.

A passionate advocate for accessibility in poetry, and for poetry as a tool of personal and social change, Clare has founded or directed numerous poetry initiatives including the Kendal Poetry Festival, Wonky Animals, the Lost Things Project and more. They have held poetry residences in numerous settings, including festivals, conferences, hospitals, factories, landfill sites and bogs; and they collaborate with artists and academics in other disciplines, including photography, folk music, film, conservation and design. Clare lectures at the University of Huddersfield and is a regular tutor for Wordsworth Grasmere, The Royal Literary Fund and The Arvon Foundation. Variously described as 'electrifying' and as 'one of the best readers on the scene', Clare performs across the UK and beyond.