The Path to Loneliness in Claire Nixon's Poetry

Claire Nixon is a contemporary British poet, novelist, short story writer, and editor, who was born in 1973. Glancing over Nixon's poetry, one cannot help but notice a recurrent aspect that permeates through  almost all her poems, that is, a strong feeling of loneliness. This overwhelming sense of loneliness has various causes and assumes several shapes in her poetry. For example, it can result from breaking up with the lover, losing the lover to death, the lover's cold-heartedness, a mother's growing anxiety about her sick daughter's health, homophobia, and drug addiction. It is also detected in some of her other literary works such as her fiction. The present paper, therefore, seeks to verify this unique aspect of her poetry first by spotting it in a number of her short stories then by examining it throughout her poetry.