Jo Shapcott

Jo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott is found writing at her most memorable and bold. In a series of poems that explore the nature of change - in the body and the natural world, and in the shifting relationships between people - these poems look freshly but squarely at mortality. By turns grave and playful, arresting and witty, the poems in Of Mutability celebrate each waking moment as though it might be the last, and in so doing restore wonder to the to the smallest of encounters.

Of Mutability

This collection includes poetry from the Antipodes, India, Africa and the Caribbean as well as the US and UK. It includes an introduction which puts the case against prejudices and narrownesses which have obscured understanding for too long.

Poems for Strange Times

Emergency Kit

Towards the end of his life the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote nearly four hundred poems in French - notably the two collections published as Les Fentres (The Windows) and Les Roses. The emergence of a French Rilke provides the starting point rather than the terminus for Jo Shapcott's new collection, Tender Taxes, which re-imagines Rilke's brief and fugitive lyrics as English poems. The occasion is Rilke, but these are more than versions: Shapcott's poems address this, arguing with the originals, crossing and re-crossing the frontier between translation and origination. Rilke and Shapcott are brought together in the shared incognito of a foreign language, 'speaking English through a French mouth'.

Tender Taxes

George Herbert

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. George Herbert (1593-1633) was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was appointed Reader in Rhetoric in 1618 and Public Orator in 1620. He was a Greek and Latin scholar, was fluent in modern languages and an accomplished musician. In 1626 he resigned his seat in parliament and took holy orders, becoming Rector of Bemerton, a tiny rural parish on Salisbury Plain, in 1630. The Temple, Herbert's great structure of poems from which the present selection is drawn, first appeared in 1633, the year of his death.

Poems

Poems 1988-1998 is a compendium from Jo Shapcott's award-winning books Electroplating the Baby, Phrase Book and My Life Asleep. It reveals her to be a writer of ingenious, politically acute and provocative imagination and justifies her reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation.

Poems 1988-1998

Her Book

Linda R. Anderson

A collection of essays on Elizabeth Bishop drawing on work presented at the first UK Elizabeth Bishop confrence, held at Newcastle University. It brings together papers by both academic critics and leading poets, including Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Deryn Rees-jones and Anne Stevenson.

Poet of the Periphery

Elizabeth Bishop

My Life Asleep is a vigorous collection of poems, lively and never succumbing to gloom, despite their black humour and sometimes macabre tone. This is Jo Shapcott's third collection. She is the joint anthologist with Matthew Sweeney of Emergency Kit for Faber, and her work is appearing in a volume of Penguin Modern Poets. She lives in London, and is kept busy on the reading circuit.

Jo Shapcott

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