Like Fragile Clay

by Sarah Cave

'Set in a version of Tove Jansson's Moominvalley, Sarah Cave’s like fragile clay is an ekphrastic meditation on grief and confession, fully illustrated by CF Sherratt’s beautiful, intelligent and arresting work.
Like fragile clay is 60 pages of poetry and illustration, printed on Mohawk Superfine and section sewn. The cover is printed on GF Smith’s Colorplan.
Sarah Cave lives in Cornwall and is studying for a practice-based PhD on 'Poetry & Prayer' at Royal Holloway. Her work has appeared in two small pamphlets, lots of magazines, and recently in the Verve Poetry Press anthology It All Radiates Outwards.
CF Sherratt is an artist based in Falmouth. His design and illustration work includes From the Chellew Room and the logos for our Guillemot Factory series. He is currently working on the graphic novel Steeplewind and is a director of Atlantic Press.'
- Guillemot Press (https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poet...)

Paperback

Published January 1, 2018

About the author

Sarah is a writer, lecturer and publisher. Sarah has published pamphlets, books and collaborations and exhibited text and craft in galleries. Sarah's third full-length collection, The Book of Yona, was published on Good Friday, 2024. Sarah co-edits Guillemot Press with Luke Thompson.

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Words emerge from the sky, / shoulders of words, / legs, arms, hands of words.” In Sarah Cave’s poetry pamphlet like fragile clay, Cave presents a sequence that’s an “homage to the wonderful, vibrant and loving world of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley”, each poem taking as its subject one or more of Jansson’s cute, famous, fantastical and whimsical creatures. It is so impressive how, through such a light and unassuming subject, Cave can exhume a wide array of themes and ideas, and does so with such an attuned ear to language, its rhythms, depths, edges: “Moomin bit his tongue / a forget-me-not token / of excess flourished / his last night-terror / a dark hallway / an echo”. From the first poem, Cave’s skill for evocative blends of sounds and images — all mediated through the Moomin lens — is so astonishing: “salt sea winds // he sits cupped beneath / the cupola // his life held in / the swinging of the bottle // the tune / the dance // the memory of home”. ‘Moominpappa’s Dada Poem’, both visually + lyrically exciting — an achievement of form — is a real standout in this short book, as is ‘I have nothing…’, in which Moomin is a drifter and a doomsday crier and a figure of subtle pathos. Finally, in ‘Untitled (Salt-Water Dissolve)’, Cave is undeniable in her narrative force: “Sea-life fills her polythene vases / with the remains of jellyfish, their blue filaments / luminescent along the shore-line. She arranges / the blooms in the kitchen window”.

[Hannah Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice to hold,
Good thick paper pages,
Nice texture of paperback minimalist cover. The line quality of the artworks by C F Sherratt remind me of abstract parts of Tove Jansson’s illustrations in the moomin books. They echo the way the poems are taking the moomin characters and giving them heavier emotions, the visual language (and written language) is shared but what is depicted is interesting and more sad. The typography is nice to look at and cleverly arranged & the images are printed at a high quality.