Towards a General Theory of Love

Clare Shaw

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781780376059
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie européenne

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.

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CONTENTS

1. TITLE PAGE
2. EPIGRAPH
3. What the Frog Taught Me About Love
4. Letter to My Mother
5. Elegy for My Grandma
6. abcedarian
7. The Night Your Mother Died
8. This is a very small poem
9. An Empirical Examination of the Stage Theory of Grief
10. Morecambe Bay as Grief
11. Monkey Writes a Poem About His Mother
12. Rhosymedre: Prelude on a Welsh Hymn
13. The Day Thou Gavest
14. Lesbian Conception in the Euston Hilton
15. Midwife, Calderdale General Hospital
16. Nocturne for My Daughter
17. This Is About My Mother
18. Child Protection Policy
19. A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation
20. Monkey and I Discuss the Difficulty of Working Therapeutically with Non-verbal Traumatic Memories
21. My Bedroom
22. An account of my reading from six to sixteen years old.
23. I Ask Monkey How He Sleeps.
24. The Impact of Neglect on the Developing Brain
25. Why Did the Monkey Cross the Road?
26. Monkey Talks About Self Injury
27. Monkey Writes a Story About God
28. Monkey Joins a Dating App
29. Self Portrait as Monkey Getting Drunk
30. When I look at her
31. Monkey Teaches Me Map-reading Skills
32. What the Goldfish Taught Me about Love
33. Self-portrait as Hermaphroditus entering the water
34. Night Swimming, Derwentwater
35. Love as an Adder in Grizedale7
36. Love as DI...