Cliff Forshaw's fifth collectionTrans is told through various voices – stone-age bone-workers, Anglo-Saxon exiles, Chinese soldiers posted to a remote part of the Wall, a Tibetan servant seeking the reincarnation of his dead master, Taliban watching The Terminator on video as ancient statues of the Buddha are blown up, Thai bar-girls, satyrs and other hybrid beasts. It culminates in a rewriting of the Metamorphoses – Ovid meets a gross-out freak circus to chat about everything from bodily modification to virtual survival: Lord Rochester’s monkey; Enigma’s horns; the Reincarnation of Saint Orlan; Kevin Cyborg; sex changes and do-it-yourself surgery. It’s myth. It’s life, but not as we know it, Jim. The myths are still with us: the details are the stuff of real lives you can find in any newspaper or on TV. A Nasa scientist believes he will soon be able to graft wings onto a human body. An American circus-artist has coral horns implanted in his skull. A professor of cybernautics has a silicon chip implant which allows him to create artificial sensation in his wife’s nervous system. A French performance artist transforms herself through plastic surgery into a new being modelled on Venus and the Mona Lisa. Heads are preserved deep-frozen for future reincarnation. “What do you look for, listen for, in a book of new poems? A voice like no other, incisive, musical? An imagination like no other, trans-forming the world you thought you knew? A word-hoard deep enough for the demands of a big spender? Look and listen here.” Jon Stallworthy “There is a real sense of attack and energy here ... (with) constant flashes and sparkles of real wit, while Forshaw’s zest and erudition combine to make his work stand out from the mass of vaguely elegiac anecdote that dominates large areas of contemporary poetry. Trans is one of the most original collections I’ve read in a long time.”                     David Kennedy, co-editor The New Poetry. Cliff Forshaw has been a Blue Nose Poet-of-the Year, Hawthornden Writing Fellow, winner of the Welsh Academy’s John Tripp Award and Hydro-Tasmania Writer-in-Residence in  Hobart.  He  teaches at the University of Hull.
	Trans is published in May 2005 by The Collective Press, Wales,  £6.50 ISBN 1-899449-11-6 Available from all good bookshops or direct from Welsh Books Council at www.gwales.com CLICK for: poems from TRANS  . poems from earlier collections and bibliography