As a young man, Jack Clemo lived in poverty amidst the bleak clay wastelands of Cornwall. He was also stone deaf, and after writing two visionary novels and his autobiographical Confession of a Rebel, he lost his sight in 1955. His Selected Poems (1988) and Approach to Murano (1993) show the development of his poetry from a puritanical anti-nature stance to a later, mellower outlook. The Cured Arno is his last collection, which he had only just completed at the time of his death in 1994.