Towards a General Theory of Love

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.

Table of 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

About the Author :
Clare Shawa Northern Writers' Award for work that appears inTowards a General Theory of Love.

Review :
There is a quiet, cool, authentic voice to the poems of Flood. A flood that destroyed Clare Shaw’s home town, mental illness, self-injury, the end of a relationship, are all experiences recounted with factual detachment… There is a sense that the poet’s most intimate surroundings have betrayed her, but the stillness and control with which Shaw writes reveal quiet layers of intensity drawn from unstable places. Caught directly in the deluge’s rising tide, Shaw is a witness who gives incantatory evidence of poetry’s power to define, rather than simply describe, the existential pain of being caught helpless in maelstroms both external and psychological. Hold your breath when you read Clare Shaw’s poems. Startling, searing, scorching, this is an emotional blast of a book.