Gay Clifford Poems

Ts. copies of poems by Gay Clifford, 1978-1984.

Gay Allis Rose Clifford, academic and poet was born in 1943 and died of cancer in 1998 aged 55. Gay was 35 when she wrote her first poem; and only 41 when, on Christmas Eve, 1984, she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage that took her short-term memory and deprived her for many months of speech and movement, and for the rest of her life of her poetic gift.

After Somerville College, Oxford, where she took a first in English in 1964 followed by a BPhil, Clifford went to the University of Warwick as a lecturer in medieval literature and later lectured in the Department of English at University College London for five years from 1979-1984.

Her essay 'Transformations of Allegory' was published in 1974. In 1979, Clifford won the Greenwich Festival poetry prize, she was published on both sides of the Atlantic, in magazines such as the 'London Review of Books'.

Publications include:

'Notes on "The merchant of Venice"' (1972)

'Poems' (1990)

''Transformations of Allegory' (1974).

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Deposited in Jan 1996 by P Clifford, Gay Clifford's mother.

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